Countless others have found and devoured the songs on the run. Premature reviews and amateur analyzes of the album flooded fan sites despite pleas from devoted Swifties to wait for the official release.
Maybe they should have. Swift released “Tortured Poets” as planned at midnight, which confirmed that the leaked tracks were indeed real. But two hours later, she made the surprise announcement that it was in fact a double album and released 15 additional tracks. The leak was barely half of the album.
Was it a win or a loss for Swift? It’s hard to say. It was at least the fourth leak of his music in a decade, despite his efforts to stop the phenomenon. But a leak today could mean something very different than it did before the advent of the streaming era.
“We now live in an attention economy,” said Ted Cohen, an advisor for streaming platforms. “Ultimately, it increases awareness.”
Cohen recalled a famous industry quote: “If your artist isn’t pirated, your artist isn’t popular.” » In the early 2000s, some managers “literally used music piracy tracking to correlate with fan interest in an artist,” he recalls.
Labels sometimes intentionally release music to stir public controversy, he added. But leaks no longer have the same appeal now that listeners are streaming music en masse rather than buying albums..
Digital leaks have been around since the 90s, when software evolved to the point where songs could be easily copied. downloaded. In 1993, Depeche Mode’s new CD “Songs of Faith and Devotion” was leaked in online message boards, via audio files that took about 30 minutes each to download over a dial-up connection, Pitchfork reported. In 2002, the critically acclaimed “The Eminem Show” leaked a few weeks early and ended up on bootleg CDs.
“People want access to it because of the novelty of the new stuff. And if they can get it, and they can get it for free because it was leaked, that’s something attractive to a rabid fan,” said Ali Aydar, who worked as the senior director of technology at Napster from 1999 to 2002 – the year the popular file-sharing company filed for bankruptcy amid a flood of copyright infringement lawsuits. Aydar said the first complaint was filed by Metallica, after the band discovered that one of their demos had been played on radio stations after being leaked on Napster.
But the leaks could then be much more disruptive, Aydar said. In the days of Napster, a downloaded track could spread over the Internet to tens of millions of people people in a few hours. Now, he says, the platforms like Spotify and YouTube has safeguards to prevent leaks from spreading – as we saw on Thursday with the leak of the “Tortured Poets”.
Sony reportedly sued a Swede for nearly a quarter of a million dollars in 2013, accusing him of leaking tracks from Beyoncé’s 2011 album, “4.” In 2020, Dua Lipa has moved up the release date of his album “Future Nostalgia” by a week after some of his songs leaked online early. “Songs that were never supposed to come out were leaked,” she said in an interview years later. “You’re figuring it out and you’re thinking about all the really bad ideas and then all of a sudden people hear that and you’re like, ‘That’s not me!’ It’s me who discovers myself.’
“Friends don’t let friends listen to Harry’s House until May 20th,” Sony tweeted in 2022, after Harry Styles’ new album “Harry’s House” went live about a month before its official release date.
City Girls rapper Yung Miami told The Washington Post that she was on her son’s father’s eve when she heard the news that her album “City on Lock” had been leaked in 2020.
“You just planned it in your head. You work with your team. It’s a whole creative thought process, so everything literally gets flushed down the toilet,” she said. “To go public about someone’s hard work…is always devastating. »
Swift has also had her fair share of song leaks over the years. She said in a 2010 Rolling Stone interview that she cried after learning “Mine,” a track from her third studio album “Speak Now,” which had been leaked 12 days earlier. His team decided to release the song on iTunes.
“Every day the album doesn’t leak is a victory,” the Big Machine Label group president told Billboard in 2012, as the label prepared to release Swift’s fourth album, “Red.” It leaked a few days before its release date.
Just like his fifth album, “1989,” in 2014. And albums six (“Reputation”) and seven (“Lover”) were also released just hours before their official release.
Swift has cracked down on previews of her music over the years. The dancers in her “End Game” music video had to perform choreography to “click the tracks” instead of the music itself, she revealed in a behind-the-scenes video.
“I remember when I did a song with her for her album, I was in San Francisco and they sent someone over with a locked briefcase with an iPad and a song on it,” Ed Sheeran said. Brazilian media Capricho in 2017. “They asked me if I liked it and I said ‘Yeah,’ and then they took it back.”
Swift has some important allies in her war against leaks: a significant portion of her fan base not only refuses to listen to them, but also controls the internet and implores others to do the same.
“It was the first time I had an album leaked without it trending on Twitter – because my fans protected it.” Swift told NPR after “1989” was leaked in 2014. “Every time they saw an illegal post, they would comment, ‘Why are you doing that?’ Why don’t you respect the value of art? Do not do that.’
“Taylor’s fans are very protective of her view,” said Georgia Carroll, a fan studies researcher who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Swift fandom. “The narrative becomes ‘real fans wouldn’t listen to leaks’ and ‘real fans will support Taylor and wait for the film to actually be released’, with criticism and attacks on those who admit to listening.”
Some Swift-related Reddit pages limited discussion of the leaked tracks, and moderators threatened to ban users who tried to share the files. On
The “Tortured Poets” leak was also new because it collides with the new AI-generated audio phenomenon. As news of the leak spread on Thursday, many would-be pirates were lured into uploading what looked like auto-generated tracks masquerading as Swift songs.
This may have reduced the number of downloads for the actual leak, but it also created comparisons between the AI tracks and the real music.
“The AI version of Fortnite with Post Malone was so awesome,” said one poster on Reddit after listening to a fake version of the first track from “Tortured Poets.” “I get sad when the real version is the opposite of that one.”
