little thoughts

the Internet, it sure does move fast doesn't it ? One minute it's all about Brad and Jen, the next global warming. If you sleep too much, i.e. do not open your RSS newsreader often enough, you're bound to feel a little behind the times.

Music is one of the areas that's been at the forefront of Internet evolution, from the early-days FTP servers to the first incarnation of Napster (R.I.P.), then on to Wifi MP3 players and online personalized radio streams. One such development has been the leak of albums before their official release date. Nowadays it is very rare for an album to not appear online at least a few weeks before it's scheduled to hit stores (both virtual and physical). It's got to be maddening for artists and their labels, but it's not a trend I see slowing down anytime soon. Not to sound too USA Today-ish here, but this has some good sides and some bad ones. The bad thing is all the effort the bands/artists go through to record the best possible product, from the quality of the sound mix, to the selection of proper tracks, are sort of in vain when a copy that often isn't the final version pops up on the peer-to-peer networks. The good thing is this advance availability can increase awareness for this release and actually lead to more people buying the album when it comes out. The reason for that being that once prominent music blogs start talking about an upcoming record that people have heard and can comment on, it creates a publicity buzz that no ad campaign can truly generate.

Case in point: the second Bloc Party album. BP is part of the recent post-punk movement, that has seen tremendous success for bands such as Franz Ferdinand, Maximo Park and Arctic Monkeys. Bloc Party's released their first album, Silent Alarm, in 2005 and quickly established themselves at the forefront of this new subgenre. The urgent guitars and piercing drums that made you want to dance were there, but they also seemed to be interested in matters of the modern world. Sure, most of their songs could be contrived to be about that universal subject that is love, but from reading interviews and trying to decipher lyrics, it also sounded as if this band thought about weightier things (for instance one of the songs on FA is called Price of Gas) . Thus their second one, due for release in February 2007, was eagerly awaited by a lot of people, myself included.

Cue this past Sunday, when word got out on music message boards and other mp3 blogs (like Stereogum) that the new BP album had leaked. Of course I hopped on my favorite download train rightaway and added the album to my iTunes library. My principle when it comes to downloading albums is: if I like, I buy. Downloading an album, to me, is just a more elaborate way to sample it than hearing it in a record store or on the radio. When I don't like I trash it, and if I do, I'll buy it (more or less promptly, but I generally get around to it). Well, it looks like I'll have to set aside 10 pounds from my February budget, because this album is really good. Like, gets better after each listen good. By yesterday I had already raved about it to pretty much every friend I talked to. Out of 11 songs there's maybe 2 I don't enjoy too much, and even these I don't skip over. Bloc Party aren't one of my favorite bands, but they might join that ellusive status with this album.

Do I think it's normal that I can listen to an album that's only due to be commercialized in 2 months ? No, not really, but that's the way things have been for a while now, and as long as it stays out of the mainstream, I don't think it will change. For now it's still just something for music geeks like myself to get excited over on Internet message boards and blogs. It might affect sales in a small way, but I suspect most people that download instead of buying weren't necessarily going to buy the CD anyway. Of course in a world where there's such a dichotomy between laws (in some countries it's illegal to even rip your own CDs to your computer) and the common practices such as the one described in this post, there's bound to be a lot of gray areas. And I'm not a black and white person.