U2’s No Line On The Horizon leaked early Wednesday morning, a week and a half before it was supposed to be available in Irish record shops and nearly two weeks before its Stateside release. Horizon, being one of the few albums on the docket that is seen as something of a commercial lock, was under heavy lock and key before its release. So what happened? Was Bono blaring his own tunes at home again? Did some enterprising warehouse worker sneak a copy to his laptop? The answer is a lot more surprising—and much more embarrassing for Universal Music Group, which is counting on this album’s sales to beef up its bottom line.
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There was some controversy around the role of indie labels in MySpace Music (the digital distribution center that was going to change the music world as we know it!); those labels wouldn’t receive the same equity in the site’s profits as the majors, essentially bringing the same stratification that exists in the old-time music business to the new music economy. MySpace still isn’t offering equity to those labels, but it did manage to sign an indie collective featuring such high-profile names as Animal Collective and… Chairlift?
Google has made the 2001 version of its search index available to celebrate its 10th birthday (it’s the oldest version the site had available–see, people, everyone needs to remember to back up their hard drives now and again!), and I figured it would be fun to plug in a few music-related terms and see what pages came up as the top results, and whether or not those pages were housed in the Internet archive known as the Wayback Machine. The results after the jump.
The just-launched MySpace Music is all about making money for the labels, right? So it would behoove them to have songs that the people want to buy available for purchase on the service, no? Come with me as I try to buy the top 10 songs on this week’s Hot Digital Tracks chart by using MySpace’s widgetry: