Countless others discovered and devoured this runaway song. Despite pleas from avid Swifties to wait for an official release, premature reviews and amateur analysis of the album flooded fan sites.
Maybe you should. Swift dropped “Tortured Poets” as scheduled at midnight, confirming that the leaked song is indeed real. But two hours later, she made a surprise announcement that it was actually a double album, with 15 more songs. The leak was only half of the album.
Was this a win or a loss for Swift? It’s hard to say. It was at least the fourth time in the past decade that her music has been leaked. Despite her efforts to quell this phenomenon. But leaks today can mean something completely different than they did before the advent of the streaming era.
“We live in an attention economy right now,” said Ted Cohen, an adviser to streaming platforms. “At the end of the day, it increases awareness.”
Cohen recalled a famous saying in the industry: “If an artist isn’t being pirated, he’s not popular.” Some managers in the early 2000s “were literally using music piracy tracking to correlate fan interest in an artist,” he recalls.
Labels sometimes intentionally leak music to create public controversy, he added. But now that listeners overwhelmingly listen to streaming music rather than buying albums, leaks no longer have the same appeal they once had..
Digital leakage has been around since the ’90s, when software evolved to make songs more easily available. Uploaded. In 1993, Depeche Mode’s new CD, Songs of Faith and Devotion, was leaked to an online chat room via audio files that each took approximately 30 minutes to download over a dial-up connection. Pitchfork reported. In 2002, Eminem’s critically acclaimed “The Eminem Show” was leaked weeks early and ended up on a pirated CD.
“People want to go there for the novelty of something new. And if they can get it, and they can get it for free just because it’s been leaked. That’s appealing to enthusiasts,” said Ali Aydar, who worked at Napster as senior director of technology from 1999 to 2002. A popular file-sharing company has filed for bankruptcy amid a flood of copyright infringement lawsuits. Idahl said the original suit was brought by Metallica after the band discovered that one of their demos had been played to radio stations after it was leaked to Napster.
But at the time, Aydar said, the leak could have had a more devastating impact. In the Napster era, uploaded track It can spread to tens of millions of people on the Internet. people within hours.Well, he said platform Spotify and YouTube has safeguards in place to prevent the breach from spreading — Same as what we saw in Thursday’s “Tortured Poet” leak.
In 2013, Sony reportedly sued a Swedish man for nearly $250,000 for leaking songs from Beyoncé’s 2011 album 4. 2020, Dua Lipa The release date of her album “Future Nostalgia” has been moved up a week after some of her songs were initially leaked online. “Songs that weren’t supposed to come out end up leaking out,” she said in an interview years later. “You come up with it and you go through all the really bad ideas and then all of a sudden people hear it and you’re like, ‘That’s not me!’ It’s me who understands me. .”
In 2022, after Harry Styles’ new album “Harry’s House” was released online about a month before its official release date, Sony announced that “Until May 20th, you will not be able to share “Harry’s House” with your friends. Don’t let me hear it,” he tweeted.
City Girls rapper Yung Miami told The Washington Post that he heard the news that his 2020 album City on Rock had been leaked at his son’s father’s wake.
“You just plan ahead in your head. You work collaboratively with a team. It’s a whole creative thought process, so literally everything gets flushed down the toilet,” she said. Ta. “It’s always shocking when someone’s hard work goes unnoticed.”
Swift has also had her fair share of music leaked over the years. She said in a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone that she cried when she learned that the song “Mine” from her third studio album, Speak Now, had been leaked 12 days early. Her team decided to rush the song to her iTunes.
In 2012, as the label was preparing to release Swift’s fourth album, Red, the president of Big Machine Label Group told Billboard, “Every day that doesn’t leak is a victory.” told. It was leaked a few days before the release date.
The same was true for her fifth album, “1989,” released in 2014. Albums 6 (Reputation) and 7 (Lover) were also leaked just hours before their official release.
Swift has been cracking down on the playback of her pre-release songs for years. Dancers in her “Endgame” music video had to perform “click track” choreography in place of actual music, she revealed in a behind-the-scenes video.
“I remember when we worked on a song together for her album, I was in San Francisco and they sent someone out with an iPad and a locked briefcase with one song in it. ” said Ed Sheeran. Brazilian media “Capricho” “They asked me if I liked it, and I thought, ‘Yeah,’ and they took it back.”
Swift has an important ally in the fight against leaks. A sizable portion of her fan base not only doesn’t listen to them, but monitors the internet and implores others to do the same.
“This was the first time an album was leaked without it trending on Twitter, because the fans saved it,” Swift told NPR after “1989” was leaked in 2014. “Every time they see that illegal post, they say, ‘Why would they do this? Why not respect the value of art? Please don’t do this. ”
“Taylor’s fans are very protective of her vision,” says Georgia Carroll, a fan studies researcher who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Swift fandom. “The narrative became, ‘Real fans won’t listen to the leaks,’ ‘Real fans will support Taylor and wait until it’s actually released,’ and criticism and attacks on those who admitted they heard it. is included.”
Some Swift-related Reddit pages restricted discussion of the leaked tracks, and moderators threatened to ban users who tried to share the files. On X, the search phrase “taylor swift leak” returned no results. Probably because the site has blocked that phrase.
The Tortured Poets leak was also novel in that it collided with a new phenomenon: AI-generated audio. After news of the leak spread on Thursday, many would-be pirates were tricked into downloading machine-generated-looking tracks masquerading as Swift songs.
While this may have reduced the number of actual leak downloads, it also led to comparisons between AI tracks and real music.
“Post Malone’s AI version of Fortnite was absolutely awesome,” one Reddit poster wrote after listening to a fake version of the first Tortured Poets song. “It would be sad if the actual version was the opposite.