Album Leaks: Good Or Bad??

     In today's digital age, more and more information is becoming readily available to good and bad consequences. In the age of today's music, that mass amount of available information can be a detriment, especially for album sales. If you look at the current trend of today, it is almost common for an artist to have an album or single that leaks. In the beginning, we as the public may have thought that this was by accident. I at least thought that there was some malicious evil person behind all of these leaks that wanted to destroy the music industry as a whole. I was shocked to find that in recent years, artists are INTENTIONALLY leaking their material.

The reason artists feel that they should do this is as a means of advertising for their material. An example of this would be if a certain artist was returning from hiatus and wanted to recapture the public's attention. However, this can almost certainly backfire on an artist, deeply affecting their album sales. A perfect example would be Beyonce. After her two year hiatus, Beyonce released the news earlier this year that her album will be released. Within weeks multiple tracks from her album had leaked to the public resulting in the worst sales of her career. Some may say this is due to impatient fans who anticipated an album while the release date was constantly pushed back. Whatever the cause, the album performed poorly, as opposed to Adele who has sold over 10 million copies worldwide.

Nowadays artists are becoming more and more aware of the detriment that a leak causes. This has recently been observed with the release of Jay-Z & Kanye West's new album. With the unique release of Watch the Throne, it was highly recognized for being one of the few albums of the digital age that didn't leak. This was due, in part, Kanye West's demands that none of the tracks that were recorded had a digital footprint, and also the fact that the album was guarded closely by its contributors. The result was a album that not only performed well digitally, but with physical copies as well.


So I feel that artists should wake up and realize that album leaks are not a good thing. The more it leaks, the less it sells!