The rush release phenomenon

[Z]

What is with this? Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and now Beyoncé have all rushed songs out for release with little warning and no music video. It seriously impairs their sales, IMO, and seems totally illogical, why release them in the middle of the week? That just skews sale data completely. My only thought is that it's to prevent the song from becoming widely leaked, i.e. they're trying to make legally purchasing music more common in this age of illegal downloading - but there are surely better ways of tackling the problem than this? For example, getting rid of the people who are leaking artists' music onto the internet all the time?! Maybe that's not possible, maybe it's people high up in the industry who're doing it, though that doesn't really make sense - it's obviously lucrative to leak music 'cause it happens all the time but still, you'd think they would try do something about that rather than rush release new singles and albums!

[Smithy]

The songs of all three of those artists leaked, to reduce the amount of illegal downloading that would have occurred between the initial release date and the day it leaked, songs are rush released.

There's not really much you can do once a song falls into the wrong hands because it's almost impossible to trace where the leak originated or how it got from someone who was supposed to have the song to someone who wasn't supposed to have it.

[Patrick]

Do people still care about those 3?

[Smithy]

Do people still care about those 3?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6Z8f2YsKTXA/TanaOZc-hiI/AAAAAAAALU8/DtBXTrPBsG0/s1600/GAGA.png


http://cdn.buzznet.com/assets/imgx/1/3/0/2/0/2/0/1/orig-13020201.jpg

[Z]

The songs of all three of those artists leaked, to reduce the amount of illegal downloading that would have occurred between the initial release date and the day it leaked, songs are rush released.

There's not really much you can do once a song falls into the wrong hands because it's almost impossible to trace where the leak originated or how it got from someone who was supposed to have the song to someone who wasn't supposed to have it.

I don't know if I buy that excuse though, it happens all the time, surely there is a network of people frequently distributing songs before they're released within the music industry? If that's the case, why is it so difficult to trace who these people are? It seems trivial when you consider the mega bucks that the big stars earn, but for most singers it must be soul destroying to spend a year working on an album only for it to be leaked and plenty of people deciding to download it and not buy a physical copy when it's released, most pop stars are actually pretty poor. I just think it's mean spirited really, I guess.

[Smithy]

I don't know if I buy that excuse though, it happens all the time, surely there is a network of people frequently distributing songs before they're released within the music industry? If that's the case, why is it so difficult to trace who these people are? It seems trivial when you consider the mega bucks that the big stars earn, but for most singers it must be soul destroying to spend a year working on an album only for it to be leaked and plenty of people deciding to download it and not buy a physical copy when it's released, most pop stars are actually pretty poor. I just think it's mean spirited really, I guess.

It happens a lot yeah, but normally it'll be a day or two before a release, If a single leaks a week or even more in Beyonce's case theres not much else you can do. And it depends on the record label I suppose, if you look at a lot of artists, they never have leaks, because the record label keeps songs tightly under wraps, but if a song is sent via email to be reviewed it's pretty easy to hack an address and leak the song.