Apparently Israeli police have time to spend on Madonna leaks

Great to hear that things are so quiet in the Middle East these days that the Israeli police force have so little to do they're taking part in raids against someone accused of leaking Madonna songs:

The person allegedly responsible for that hack and leak was arrested in Israel on Wednesday after a joint operation by Israeli police and the FBI. Adi Lederman, 38, was charged with hacking into Madonna's computer and stealing files including the unreleased music.

Apparently Lederman had taken part in a TV singing competition along the lines of The X Factor, although there doesn't appear to be any connection between the two crimes.

Madonna has issued a statement, which appears to confuse 'being charged' with 'being convicted':

"I am profoundly grateful to the FBI, the Israeli Police investigators and anyone else who helped lead to the arrest of this hacker. I deeply appreciate my fans who have provided us with pertinent information and continue to do so regarding leaks of my music. Like any citizen, I have the right to privacy. This invasion into my life - creatively, professionally, and personally remains a deeply devastating and hurtful experience, as it must be for all artists who are victims of this type of crime."

Psst, Madonna - didn't you describe the massive sales of the rush-released music as a "miracle"? Didn't that offset the deep devastation even a little?

Madonna sticks to the terrorism line, something something lizard people

Talking to The Guardian, Madonna has barely softened her claim that having her music leaked onto the internet was a form of terrorism:

Speaking to the Guardian on Sunday, the singer said she was “living in a state of terror” following the leak, adding that there was “a big possibility” they were the result of her personal computer being hacked.

“Obviously there is a person, or a group of people behind this that were essentially terrorising me. I don’t want to sound alarming, but certainly that’s how I felt. It’s one thing if someone comes into your house and steals a painting off your wall: that’s also a violation, but, your work, as an artist, that’s devastating.

“I’m an artistic person, I’m very expressive. I’m sorry if words alarm people, but that’s what it felt like. It was not a consensual agreement. I did not say ‘hey, here’s my music, and it’s finished.’ It was theft.”

Now, if she went simply with "theft", that'd be a fair description of what happened. But terrorism?

Talking at the end of a week when 140 people were killed for being at school, it would take an astonishing lack of understanding or compassion to try and make a case that simply having a few files lifted and dumped online was in any way comparable to that; would that all terrorism could be solved by simply bringing forward the presale date for an album, eh?

But having overbaked the leak, there's more grand claims lining up to be made:

Madonna unexpectedly released six tracks from Rebel Heart on iTunes, following the leak of the unfinished songs earlier in the week: the album itself is not due for release until March. She immediately reached No 1 in the iTunes chart in 36 countries, a situation she described as a miracle.

A miracle, no less. Not only do we have terrorism at one end of the scale, but the intercession of the almighty to make a popular artist able to sell music in quantities large enough to get to the top of a list of sales. Take that, Lazarus, if you thought you were the last word in miracles.

The only way this could get any more absurd would be if it turns out Madge is engaging with David Icke style conspiracy theories as well. But that'd be a step too far, right?

The six songs from Rebel Heart released thus far do not shy away from controversy: one, Illuminati, mocks the various conspiracy theories on the internet that implicate a variety of entertainers – including Jay-Z and Lady Gaga – in membership of a shadowy ruling elite.

“There’s a lot of talk in pop music right now about people saying, ‘Oh, this person’s a member of the Illuminati,’ or they’re Illuminati, or you’re Illuminati, and people’s idea that there’s a group of entertainers or very wealthy people, they’re referred to as the Illuminati, and they work behind the scenes and they control things and they’re very powerful, and there’s possibly a reference to something dark, or black magic, or something like that. And I have to say I laugh at all of those things.

“I think there are some people who don’t mind being referred to as that, but I know who the real Illuminati are, and where that word came from. The root of the word is “illuminate”, and that means “The enlightened ones”, and it came from the Age of Enlightenment, when a lot of arts and creativity flourished, from Shakespeare to Isaac Newton, to Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo: the philosophers, artists, scientists were all engaged in a kind of high level of consciousness through their work, and they were enlightening and inspiring people around the world. And those are the true Illuminati. So the purpose for writing that song was really in a way, ‘So, if you think I’m the Illuminati, then thank you very much, a compliment, because I would like very much to be part of that group, the real Illuminati, and this is what it’s not’”.

Yeah, it's like one of those magic eye pictures; if you stare at those comments for a minute or two, an actual lizard will leap out of the screen at you. "I'm delighted to be part of the Illumnait because it's actually being like Shakespeare" is very much the Masonic "I know what you are but what am I" of comebacks.

Odd, though, that Madonna doesn't seem to think that the Illuminati might be behind the terror/miracle of her leaks and sales. Wake up, Madonna. Clearly the goat lizards are pulling your strings more than you realise.

Madonna releases new music; the world tries to sound interested

Of course. Of course, Madonna's new stuff is working with Nicki Minaj. It fits the pattern of the last couple of decades where she appears to have a six-month old copy of Billboard delivered (perhaps she has them sent to her via Yodel) and she hooks up with whoever was hot back then.

She couldn't look more like a desperate tourist if she films the video using a selfie stick.

One of the songs is called Bitch I'm Madonna, which does at least manage to release Robbie William's She's Madonna from the long-held shame of 'the worst record with Madonna's name in the title'.

These songs are being released now because of the leak earlier in the week - you'll probably have heard her describe this act as "artistic rape" and being like "terrorism", showing that she's still got the power to be outrageous, just not in a positive way any more. It might seem odd back then these tracks were dismissed by Madge:

She dismissed the leaked versions as "unfinished demos stolen long ago" and thanked fans for their "loyalty" in "not listening" to the unfinished material.

... because now she's describing the same songs as a gift. Apparently they've been finished:

"I was hoping to release my new single 'Living For Love' on Valentine's Day with the rest of the album coming in the Spring. I would prefer my fans to hear completed versions of some of the songs instead of the incomplete tracks that are circulating. Please consider these six songs as an early Christmas gift."

They're not actually a gift, as to get them officially you have to preorder the album, so it's more of a fire sale. And if they're finished, it's puzzling how many of them don't even have a title.

Madonna leaks; manager wants you to do his job for him

At first, it was just a bit of Madonna's forthcoming single, Rebel Heart, that had been pushed online.

That didn't make her happy.

But if Madonna was annoyed at her snatch leaking online, worse was to come. The whole thing is now out there.

People want to know what happened:

Guy Oseary took to Twitter to ask fans to assist in finding whoever was responsible for the leak.

He wrote: "I would be grateful to any @madonna fans that can assist us in finding those responsible for the leak. We appreciate your help."

Oseary is Madonna's manager. Not be confused with an ossuary, of course. One's job is to keep safe the skeletal remains of a human being; the other is an ossuary.

So, yes, Oseary has decided to ask Twitter if they knew "who was responsible". It's unclear if he followed up this with "nobody is in trouble, we just want to know" and "we're not angry, just disappointed".

It's surprising that Madonna's management team are so rickety they have to, effectively, ask the entire world who outsmarted them.

Michael Jackson loved Gloucestershire

I've read this story, about how a song Michael Jackson wrote about Gloucestershire has leaked onto the internet. I've read it twice. And I'm still not convinced it's anything other than a fantasy Points West item made real:

According to reports, Michael Jackson visited Gloucestershire while he was in The Jackson Five, and apparently said the time spent in the county was among his fondest memories.

Presumably, if the band spent time in Gloucestershire it would have been around the time of the 1972 UK tour?

Coming next week: Aaliyah's passionate love of Dawlish Warren; the Big Bopper's song about Little Rissington

Cher seems to be only person in the world convinced GaGa "leak" wasn't a stunt

It's not just the disappointing GaGa comeback single that has been "leaked" online. The duet between GaGa and Cher has also fallen onto the internet, and Cher is mad as a wasp nest duct-taped to a leopard. ContactMusic has attempted a translation:

"Just heard (The Greatest Thing)! F**k ! It's not even the right f**king version!!! Why do ppl (people) think this kinda leaking s**t is ok ! I'm so f**king disappointed... I've sat on (that) song 4 (for) over a yr (year). Now some a**hole leaks (the) wrong version! Gaga's single is great, & that's all that matters."

It's unclear why, if all that matters is that GaGa's single is great, what Cher is all up in a lather about.

It turns out leaking records is good for sales

Ethan Kaplan is currently the horribly-named "VP Product, Live Nation"; prior to that, though, he was an executive at Warners Music Group. He's been on Twitter, confirming one of those things you've always suspected about what happens when albums leak:

Let me simplify this answer: YES IT LEADS TO MORE SALES. DEMAND = DEMAND W/ $$$$$$ IF PRODUCT GOOD.

Simplified further: MUSIC BUSINESS (RECORDED): your product isn't diamonds mined from a secret mythical land.

And beyond broadband/napster/whatever, what hurt you the most is PEOPLE FIGURED THAT OUT. Cynicism caught up with you.

Of course, it's only ex-executives who would be honest about that. Or soon-to-be-ex-executives.

Protection: Have Jay-Z and Kanye outsmarted the leakers?

The BBC News website gets quite excited by the lengths Jay-Z and Kanye West went to to stop their album leaking:

Billboard magazine reported some of the steps they took - such as storing the music on fingerprint-protected hard drives that were kept in locked suitcases.

To keep hackers out, their producers turned off wi-fi on their computers as the album was recorded in pop-up studios in hotel rooms around the world.

Draft versions of songs were not sent by email. Instead, the duo insisted that all collaborators must come to their temporary studios to record their contributions in person.

The album's art director Virgil Abloh even suggested on Twitter - possibly joking, possibly not - that producer Noah Goldstein had been "sleeping with the hard drives for like 10 months straight".

A man who had been fixing the toilets down the corridor from where one of the recordings took place had his vocal cords removed to stop him singing the songs in the street. Kanye West used selective breeding to create guard dogs crossed with giraffes, that would be unable to bark the beats being used. Seventeen people were disappeared to Central America, only being released again once the album was available. And all the files were password protected with the password "pA55w0rd", which nobody would ever be able to guess.

Lots of fun and games - it must have been like being in Spy Kids 5: The Disappointing Musical - but, almost certainly, pointless, as the key measures were quite simple:

Only a small circle of people had access to the music before it was released on iTunes last Monday, at which point it was delivered to a CD manufacturing plant.

Yes, for all the wi-fi cloaking and circles of toads' blood, if you want to stop a CD leaking don't give it to anyone who might knock a copy off before it's ready to hit the shops.

Of course, easy to do when it's a long-awaited crossover-double-up between Mr. Z and Mr. West. Slightly harder if you're, say, Joe Lean And Jing Jang Jong to persuade your record label to just prepare the presses before they've had a chance to hear what they're going to be releasing. So might not work for everyone.

But did it work for Jay-Z and West?

The album has now broken the iTunes one-week sales record, selling almost 290,000 copies in its first seven days.

That might be down to it not having leaked. Equally, though, it could be down to iTunes having it a week before it was in the shops.

And given the margins are a bit better on physical copies than on digital versions, the duo might have been better off not bothering with the warlock fastening their laptops with a hemlock rope, and just carried on as normal.

But, hey, then how would they have got to play the Hardy Boys?

Anti-filesharing lawyers emails "published to the web"

Whoopsie-daisy. ACS:Law, one of the legal firms that has done very nicely, thank you, out of pursuing unlicensed music files appears to have published thousands of pieces of personal data on the internet. Technology Guardian reports:

The website went offline after users of the online messageboard 4Chan orchestrated a sustained attack on it, putting the site offline for much of the week. A file containing the confidential information – which includes thousands of emails to and from the company – appears to have been inadvertently published on the front page of ACS:Law's website as it recovered from an attack, security experts Symantec told the Guardian. The file has since been distributed widely across the internet.

What do ACS say?

Andrew Crossley, the lead solicitor at ACS:Law who has shouldered much of the ire from compainants, this morning told the Guardian that he had contacted the information commissioner about the distribution of this confidential information, adding: "We're aware of it and unable to comment about it for legal reasons."

What those legal reasons are aren't clear - perhaps ACS:Law have taken an injunction out on themselves to prevent them suggesting that email communications with them might end up on the internet. Although they'd be aware of it happening.

You might think that they'd pop along to have a chat with a similarly stupidly punctuated PR firm for advice on whether not saying anything at all is the best approach when many of your secrets have apparently been strewn across the internet.

6Music closure leaker "leaves" the BBC

The person who let The Sunday Times know early about plans to close 6Music and the Asian Network has 'left' the BBC, reports The Independent this morning.

That appears to be 'left' in the manner of 'it's quite late, I'm sure you want to be getting on, don't let us detain you' rather than 'I'm off, then, toodle-oo'.

Leakobit: Alan Carton

Alan Carton, creator of the @diditleak Twitter service, died earlier this month.

Carton started tracking music industry leaks in 2007, and managed to keep himself anonymous to the end. He kept running the service even while being treated in hospital for the tumour which claimed his life, as his mother told Village Voice:

At the hospital, Carton saw the leak tips arriving on his phone and was clamoring for his laptop. "Oh my God! I gotta get on here, my followers will be wondering what I've got!" he said, according to his mother. He was admitted to the hospital on a Friday and was updating @diditleak by Sunday. "In the hospital, he always had his laptop with him and his cellphone," Jennifer remembers. "Alan would write while he was in bed. People write and say his 'company' was so cool. He said, 'Little do they know I'm just lying in the hospital here with cancer, just bored with nothing to do.'"

In the last 24 hours, the DidItLeak Twitter feed has resumed sending out updates, in part as a tribute to Carton's work.

Alan Carton died last Saturday. He was 23.

Leaking: you're doing it wrong

An email plops into our inbox:

first Dead Man's Bones leaked track

Hey- here is the first leaked song from Dead Man's Bones called "My Body's a Zombie For You". The record comes Oct 6 on Anti.

*link*

Feel free to post/share

If you've got your PR team sending the track out by email, it's not actually a leak, is it?

Guns N Roses leaker gets his sentence

A heavy-handed sentence for leaking Guns N Roses' album 'Chinese Democracy' has been handed to Kevin Cogill, as the RIAA would hope for:

A federal judge has sentenced a man who pleaded guilty to leaking part of the Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy" to a year's probation.

Blogger Kevin Cogill (KOH'gill) will also serve two months of home confinement, subject his computers to government scrutiny, and record a public service announcement for the Industry Association of America [sic].

The prosecution had wanted him to go to prison - prison - but presumably because he didn't force anybody to listen to the godawful record, the courts decided to just be a little over the top.

What's the point of the PSA? "Hello... I'm someone you don't know. I did a bad thing, and now I'm warning you not to do it, otherwise you might end up pretty well known, on TV and everything. And you wouldn't want that to happen, would you?"

The rationale for the legal action was that Cogill's work reduced the number of people interested in buying the record. By which measure, the way Axl Rose killed any interest anybody might have had in buying the record, through making it so awful, should leave Rose looking at 20 to 25 years.

Did It Leak shows how leaky the supposedly anti-leak music industry is. In real time.

If Pirate Bay is so bad the music industry must crush it for telling people they can find records on torrents, where does that leave @diditleak, a twitter stream of breaking leaking record news?

Presumably the BPI-RIAA won't be keen to close this one down, given that the early leaks of most of the records there point fingers not at EVIL FANS but, erm, the people who work for labels doing the leaking.

Lupe Fiasco is very, very upset

Who knew it was so easy to insult Lupe Fiasco? All it takes is a little bit of bittorrentage:

"If you come across it and you like it and keep it to yourself that's all cool with me but to make it where as other people are able to download it in a public forum is honestly an insult to me. Especially because of how much I love you guys. That shit is kinda like a slap in the face."

Like a slap in the face, but with the advantage that you don't have to get within an extended arm's distance of him. But he's only so insulted because he loves you so much. Yes, you. And what do you do? You slap him in the face.

Actually, it's not really you at all. Lupe believes in the record label myths:

My entire first album leaked and possibly cost me from going platinum my first time out as the final estimates of how many people actually downloaded that album illegally was well over half a million."

The final estimates? You mean a guess? And, yes, it's possible it cost you some sales - after all, there are some artists who won't thrive in a world where you can try before you buy. But it didn't cost you half a million sales, Lupe. You're just making yourself look even more foolish.

U2 album seeps onto the internet

When albums splurge out online before the official release date, normally you could not contain the angers of the record company; even with a large metal bucket with a self-sealing lid. "We must strip naked the journalist/presser/passer-by who did this and beat them until they cry" is pretty much the line.

But what about if the it's the label itself that bungles? Let's say, for example, that Universal managed to botch the release of its biggest album this year, U2's No Line On The Horizon?

UMG’s Australian branch is being blamed for accidentally leaking the album, offering high quality downloads for purchase from their digital music site Getmusic.au. The downloads, which were being sold roughly two weeks before the album’s February 27th Irish release date, were available for about two hours before the error was noticed, Forbes reports. By then, it was too late. The album had been downloaded and passed along via P2P servers and message boards.

Hilariously, Universal hadn't even trusted journalists with review copies; at preview parties, journos were frisked for recording devices.

Universal appear to have chucked in the towel; the album is now streaming from the U2 MySpace - for anyone impatient with an audio-stream ripping program to make their own, early, cost-free version.

Reuters offer advice to managers

There's a sweet, old-fashioned advice column penned by Reuters that's just appeared online, offering advice to artists and management about how they can go about stopping internet leaks of new music.

Oddly, the most obvious one - since quite often the leak is a deliberate attempt to generate publicity, don't do it in the first place - is missed off the checklist.

Oasis "leak" onto the net

The new Oasis album, Dig Out That Muck From Under Your Fingernails, has appeared online, causing worries for the internet industry.

ISPs are concerned that the flooding of clumping Oasis tunes online might lead to panicky disconnections from customers afraid they might find the tunes being downloaded to their hard drives by accident. "This is quite a worry" admitted one, "all we can do is to stress that proper precautions - such as not opening suspicious emails from Gordon Smart, or clicking on links recommended by Chris Moyles - will keep you safe."

There are no plans to bring forward the release date of the album - officially due on October 6th - as there seems to be an enormous supply of people who haven't been put off buying an Oasis album by knowing what it'll sound like in advance.

Death Magnetic comes early

Metallica's new album has been released in the UK a day earlier than planned - ostensibly because it had been leaked on the internet, although The Gauntlet wonders why only the UK release date would be affected by the leak - could it be that only the UK internet leaks? Or is it that it's only in the UK that the band are battling Glasvegas for the number one slot?

These leaks are intentional

The lovely Spacelab people get just slightly over-excited as These Arms Are Snakes put a track online:

These Arms Are Snakes have leaked the song Red Line Season, from their new album Tail Swallower & Dove. Their label Suicide Squeeze says the the song "eerily pummels and shakes punk-rock to its foundation."

So, the band know about it. The label know about. They're promoting it. In what way, exactly, is that a "leak" rather than a "release"?