"Jay-Z wanted to try to get people to listen to the whole album." I didn't even know this album was coming out until I saw it pop up on Spotify today. Thank you.įiled Under: jay-z, kanye west, leaks, piracy We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise - and every little bit helps. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support.
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If anything it seems to ignore the modern marketing strategy, where new tracks are purposely leaked to get the buzz going. All it does is make sure the marketing plan goes down without anyone being able to listen to it early or help promote it on blogs and such when it comes out. It does little to nothing to stop actual infringement. It limits the creative freedom (such as emailing back and forth tracks). But I'm curious if the "cost" really is worth it. is something like this even worth it? The article also notes that others may follow suit. Any artist who wants to avoid leaks really just needs to do something like that, and ignore the Mission Impossible crap.īut the larger point is. The reason this album didn't leak early was because they delivered the masters as close to the release as possible. For all the talk of "hackers" breaking into computers and grabbing copies of tracks early, most tracks leak because of one thing: someone in the final processing chain gets the master early and leaks the tracks. On top of that, all the crazy "CIA" stuff isn't what stopped the album from leaking. Jay-Z wanted to try to get people to listen to the whole album. It's clear from the article that it wasn't about the economic threat of a pre-release, but how it fit into the marketing strategy. But this story first of all wasn't about "piracy" so much as it was about leaks. I know that plenty of musicians "care" about piracy. Our critic said this proves that I'm a liar when I say "musicians don't care about piracy." Of course, I've never said nor implied any such thing. The drives apparently had biometric security, in that you could only access them with a fingerswipe matching fingerprints.Īnd, amazingly, all of this "worked." The album apparently was released on time without any leaks. Meanwhile, all the work was saved on hard drives locked up in a briefcase. Collaborators were not allowed to hear tracks outside of the room (so no emailing around tracks for ideas).
Then there were three key engineers who turned off all computer WiFi in the rooms. They recorded in "pop up" studios they set up in hotel rooms, rather than at real recording studios. One of our usual critics pointed us to a recent article at Billboard about the insane lengths that Jay-Z, Kanye West and the producers of their joint album went through to keep the album from leaking early.