New Album Leaks

This past week has brought yet another wave of album leaks. The latest victims are U2 and Kelly Clarkson. Both artists spent considerable time, money, and energy to keep their albums under wraps. Yet, the albums still leaked.

The albums leak in a number of ways. Sometimes, pre-release albums are provided to media outlets so that they can review the album. Some of these inevitably make it online. There have been other cases where albums leak through email. Studios sometimes send tracks back and forth to artists and other production crew through email. If the email can be hacked, the song will be leaked. And in Kelly Clarkson’s case, it seems like Apple’s iTunes may have been partly to blame. Instead of offering the ability to pre-order the album, the Norwegian site made the mistake of offering the album in its entirety.

So what is an artist to do? In these times, does it even make sense any more to try to keep the album under wraps? We now see that the latest U2 album, “No Line on the Horizon,” which is set for a March 3 release, is available for streaming on MySpace. I don’t think this was in the plans prior to the leak. But now U2 is trying to make some advertising money from the album and is trying to get people to listen on a legitimate channel.

This spells further death for the album. But the artist should not go into an album release with the expectation that they will keep the album secure until release. No matter how hard they try, they need to develop strategies where a clean album release is not even in the picture. So, what are other ways that they can utilize this? Artists need to find ways to capitalize on the leaks and the talk that it generates. This can be done with live tours, tasteful advertising along with the streaming album on the band’s home page, and the offering of value-added albums that are signed or are in some way unique.

Stay tuned,
Erik
erikrostad.com