The Leaks Come Out At Night: More On The Pre-Release Mini-Controversy

Looks like we’re not the only ones who think MP3 leaks can be a good thing. An article in today’s Christian Science Monitor notes that some music-industry employees see such pre-release spillage as a way to measure fans’ enthusiasm:

Kris Gillespie, who manages Domino Records, says leaking wasn’t out of the question for his label, the home of the rockers Franz Ferdinand and indie buzzmakers the Arctic Monkeys. “We were seriously considering leaking tracks,” Gillespie says of the latest Franz Ferdinand album, “because the watermarks and copy protection were almost doing too good a job.”

Gillespie says he checks peer-to-peer trading sites every day to see if the new Arctic Monkeys album has leaked, “but more out of curiosity than out of vigilance,” he notes.

With the formation of this new Internet-industrial complex, the absence of music trading can signal serious problems. “If no one’s bothered leaking the album the week before the release date, the fear would be that no one cares,” says Brendan Bourke, of the music publicity firm TagTeam. “When you’re getting within a few weeks of a release, you want people to start talking about it. It almost behooves you to leak.”

To which we say, “Behoove away! Especially if you’re behooving the new White Stripes or R. Kelly discs.” But these comments reinforce what we were saying before–namely, that bands that have come of age in the Internet era, leaks can only be a good thing: They can get the songs to the fans (some of whom are going to buy the damn thing anyway), and use those fans’ response to build momentum. So let the floodgates open and the FLAC files fly.

Music labels spring leaks – for publicity [Christian Science Monitor] (Ed. note: To see a photo for which we spent twenty minutes trying to come up with a Louis Leakey/Arctic Monkeys joke, click here)