From The Editors: A Word On Idolator’s New Leak Policy

noah | June 14, 2007 1:47 am

As you may have noticed, Idolator’s been a little less leaky lately. Our aim has always been to bring you great music–or maybe not-so-great music that still deserved to be heard–and we’ve always tried to do so in a way that keeps everyone (readers, artists, labels) happy. This has not been an easy task: There remains a lot of gray area when it comes to MP3s, and like so many other music blogs, we’ve had to deal with numerous major-label cease-and-desist letters since our inception (and we’ve complied with all of them). The back-and-forth has become a frustrating process, and one that’s drained plenty of the site’s resources. To paraphrase the great James Newell Osterberg, Jr.: It’s no fun.

From now on, we will not host “leaked” pre-release tracks that have not been sanctioned for posting by record labels. However, because a leak is newsworthy, we’ll continue to link to sites that carry them when we come across them in our websurfing, and we’ll maintain our “Leak Of The Day” feature, albeit in a new format. Unfortunately, during the week in which we were figuring out how to proceed with this feature, new albums by Ryan Adams, the White Stripes, and Kelly Clarkson hit the Internet, and they’ve already been discussed to death. So we had to look around today to see what other hot titles had broken into the market, which leads us to…

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ALBUM: Spa Moods: Sound Of Nature Vol. 4 WEB DEBUT: June 13, 2007 RELEASE DATE: Summer 2007 SOUND QUALITY: 206kbps WHERE TO FIND IT: New Music Albums ONE-LISTEN VERDICT: As you might imagine, figuring out what to do about leaks made us a little tense. Did listening to ambient tracks like “The Purple Butterfly” and “The First Snowflakes” calm us down? No. But it’s still much better than Volume 3.