Every musician's worst nightmare is to wake up one morning, just to see their hard work posted all over the internet, weeks before it was meant to be released. Ranging from Dua Lipa to Daft Punk to Playboi Carti, ‘music leaks’ have affected just about every artist. Since the transition of music from analog to digital, leaks have become increasingly more popular. But how and why do they happen?
The origins of music leaking and bootlegging began in the 1960’s after the disappearance of Bob Dylan. With a scramble to find his unreleased recordings, a trend was born. However, for decades, most sharing of unreleased music happened out of the view of the public eye, until the website Napster was released in 1999. On Napster, users could directly share downloaded music files from peer to peer. This directly led to the distribution of unreleased or leaked songs becoming very prevalent on the website. Consequently, Napster was sued by Metallica in 2000 for the illegal distribution of their song that was meant to be played on the soundtrack for the upcoming Mission Impossible: II.
Fast forward to now, where hackers, streaming errors, and unwarranted studio recordings are all different ways that an artist's music can be leaked before its official release date. For hackers, sometimes the appeal is to hold the unreleased music hostage for ransom, or sell it online. For example, in 2019 a hacker by the name of Zimbra started to leak files from alternative band Radiohead, of demos and studio recordings for their album ‘OK Computer’. In return, it is rumored that he asked for $150,000 from Radiohead to not release the recordings, and on top of that tried to sell them to fans. However Radiohead did not want to bargain with a hacker, and instead released the recordings on Bandcamp for charity.
Artists also face the threat of losing money from sales, if pirating and illegal distribution of their songs is popular. In the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic, pop star Dua Lipa planned on releasing her album in mid April of 2020. Unfortunately for the star, her album was leaked in full at the end of March, causing her to push forward the release date of the album. It is speculated that this was to reduce the financial loss that would come from piracy and illegal streaming of the album. Dua Lipa then went on an Instagram live, where she grew emotional surrounding the state of her album release.
The new queen of hyperpop Charli XCX has more than enough experience with music leaks, to the extent of cancelling a whole album. In the Summer of 2017, the Google Drive folder containing 10 songs from Charli XCX’s upcoming album, was hacked off of mixing engineer Spike Stent. The album was supposed to be released just a month later in September, but ended up being scrapped all together. The album was later labeled by fans as ‘XCX World’ and is easily accessible on the internet.
After the passing of rapper Juice WRLD in 2019, his music is one of the largest troves of music found on the internet. The artist had thousands of both finished and incomplete songs when he passed, leading to fans crazing over his unreleased material. While some songs have been released officially by his record label and family, the rest can be found online for anyone to find. For some, it seems unethical, but others counter that the whole music leak industry is unethical to begin with.