These days, it’s a foregone conclusion that an upcoming album is going to leak onto the internet. With the web more accessible than ever before, yet-to-be-released albums are finding their way online earlier and earlier, sometimes even months ahead of release, leaving artists and their management teams to handle the fallout.
Most recently, Icelandic superstar Bjork announced that her highly anticipated new album, Vulnicura, would arrive several months earlier than its scheduled March release date. While it was welcome news for many fans, it was soon revealed that the album had leaked online, forcing the singer to release the album earlier than planned.
As Billboard reports, Bjork was first notified of the leak by fans through her website, with fans informing Bjork that Vulnicura had become available for illegal download. It was then that Derek Birkett, founder of her label One Little Indian, sprang into action, reaching out to “a few friends in the business”.
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“Overall, the advice was to do a pre-sale on iTunes with the instant gratification of two or three tracks,” Birkett recounts. “Bjork ideally wanted to get the whole record out, and to cut a very long story short, she made a mostly artistic decision that she wanted to get it all out. She felt very passionately about it.”
This put Birkett into an awkward position with some of his licensees, who argued that uploaded the album in its entirety immediately would have an adverse effect on its physical sales, with Rough Trade Germany warning him that if the whole record was made available, they would refuse to work with Bjork going forward.
“We had to switch some of our partners for other partners,” he explains. “It had a massive, massive impact on us.” Bjork’s team was already feeling the brunt of a leaked album, with Birkett then reaching out to iTunes after asking Amazon if Vulnicura could be made available as a free download to those who pre-ordered its physical edition.
While they initially agreed, Amazon pulled out once the album became available on iTunes, claiming One Little Indian was engaging in a marketing scam to make Vulnicura the No. 1 album on iTunes. “Basically what happened is I panicked and gave it to iTunes because I told them, ‘All these deals are going down and we’re losing a lot of money,'” Birkett says.
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“I told them to put it on the cover and we’d give them the exclusive. Then I realized the political implications of giving iTunes the exclusive,” he adds. The digital retail giant agreed to maintain the exclusive for a few days, after which Amazon agreed to support Vulnicura.
Despite the nightmare situation caused by the leak, Birkett indicated that the label would not pursue legal action against those who initially posted Vulnicura online. Alternatively, pop legend Madonna recently expressed her “profound” gratitude to the FBI and Israeli Police, who arrested the hacker who leaked her own upcoming album.
As CNN reports, the singer took to Facebook to announce that Israeli police have arrested a hacker who stole unfinished versions of her newest songs and leaked them online, adding, “I deeply appreciate my fans who have provided us with pertinent information and continue to do so regarding leaks of my music.”
