If Adele went digital before physical, it’s possible that small change could’ve kept her music out of leakers hands.
Kanye’s Life Of Pablo didn’t leak, Kendrick’s Untitled Unmastered didn’t leak, Anderson. Paak’s Malibu didn’t leak. We haven’t seen many major releases this year arrive ahead of schedule but the few that we have seen only came days before the official drop. Pitchfork’s Eric Harvey wrote an article on the history of album leaks citing Bob Dylan’s Great White Wonder as one of the first album leaks. But it wasn’t until after 1993 that it started to become a casual occurrence. As dial-up became broadband and the internet evolved with technological advances the leaking of albums became the music industry's Achilles heel. Napster and the rise of piracy was like a virus that slowly started to spread until every major artist was affected. Stephen Witt wrote of this phenomenon last year, in an article titled, “ The Man Who Broke The Music Business,” he speaks with Bennie Glover, a former employee of a CD manufacturing plant in the '90s.
It’s an incredible story how a man with a bit of technical savvy and a lot of hustle positioned himself with an online organization that was like an internet mafia, a true organization that spent over a decade disrupting the status quo and it wasn’t for profit. They were the robin hood of internet pirates. They were caught soon after Kanye’s Graduation and 50 Cent’s Curtis. Like all classic drug-dealing movies taught us, it’s always the moment when you say one last time that they catch you.
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