How do advance copies of music move across the internet? How do you stay updated?

April 4, 2004 5:31 AM

What has always intrigued me is how advance copies of music make their way across the internet. I vaguely know that they almost always start in newsgroups and move from there, but where does it go? How does a person stay updated? How does a person learn about a specific groups release?
posted by Keyser Soze to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Buzz. Fan-sites post the news that it's available, the hardcore fans get hold of it, tell THEIR friends, etc... it eventually makes it's way to the music rags, from where the general populace finds out, and the band gets interviewed, where they express their chagrin/happines/indifference/etc about it.

Or are you talking about how the advances actually get ON the net in the first place?
posted by cheaily at 5:43 AM on April 4, 2004

Response by poster: I am talking about digitally reproducing the advanced copies on the internet, how a person downloads them. I am not looking to personally download this myself, I have a friend who is writing a piece on it and I told him I would throw it on askme.
posted by Keyser Soze at 5:46 AM on April 4, 2004

ahhhhh.

depending on where it's been leaked from, it's one of the following ways:

a journo gets an advanced copy on CD, copies it and gives it to a few friends, who might put it online

else demo sessions / rough mixes might be nicked by a bored engineering assistant from a studio, burnt to CD and put online.

most music is passed between studio and label via either CD or dat during the production phase, it's a faily trivial task to rip a CD and put it online, and only slightly more difficult to put a DAT online.

once it's up there, it's just a matter of downloading the files and copying them somewhere.
posted by cheaily at 5:58 AM on April 4, 2004

In fact (speaking from some studio experience) many studios upload rough mixes from a band's studio sessions to some studio-maintained FTP space where the band and presumably anyone else who knows where to look can download the files.
posted by emelenjr at 6:03 AM on April 4, 2004

I have a friend who works for a record label. The pay is crap but he gets advance releases of everything he's interested in, usually the same way the radio stations do. It's a normal CD, minus all the artwork and liner notes. If we share interest in a particular band, the advance may make its way to me. Unless instructed otherwise, I may or may not make one of these albums [whose title and songlist are already available on the band's site, just not hotlinked to anything] available via p2p methods. Anyone who knows the album title can find it and download it easily. Once they have a digital copy of the song, they can make it available in any way they choose [usually via a route like newsgroups or other p2p networks so the uploader isn't linked directly and potentially hassled by the label]. Anything popular spreads fairly quickly and is also fairly quickly distanced from its original source.
posted by jessamyn at 9:04 AM on April 4, 2004

Sometimes band members leak advance copies. This can cost them their job.
posted by the cuban at 9:34 AM on April 4, 2004

btw, right now on usenet an album from Mission to Burma that isn't set to release until May or June is already out. Wilco is floating around too. Anyone know of other good early releases right now?
posted by mathowie at 9:40 AM on April 4, 2004

According to Pitchfork Wilco's making some changes to the album—a new track is being added and maybe some track order changes. I don't think the currently leaked advances reflect that.
posted by kenko at 11:06 AM on April 4, 2004

The perception is that it usually starts in Usenet, but in fact, the albums are almost always first distributed in private IRC channels and FTP sites. Just like the software and movie scenes, music pirates self-organize into groups with their own release providers (people working at labels, radio stations, record stores, etc) and couriers. From IRC fileservs and private FTP, it moves to other IRC and FTP sites and then into the Usenet newsgroup for wider distribution. Once it hits Usenet, it makes its way into the peer-to-peer networks and it's effectively completely disseminated.

Keeping track of releases is a bit more difficult. There are websites that track group releases for software and film, but since MP3 releases are much more frequent, it's usually too much work to maintain a release database. Some sites crawl Usenet or IRC for NFO files, but they're not comprehensive. If you want to follow a particular group's releases, the best way is probably to hang out in their IRC channel.
posted by waxpancake at 12:52 PM on April 4, 2004

I was recently forwarded an advance album by a FUCKING AWESOME MeFi member. (you know who you are!) It's the new Magnetic Fields, not due out 'til May. And the album rocks. I think at least three of my friends are planning to pick it up as soon as it's out.

I haven't felt this cool since the 'Hail to the Thief' bootleg.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:40 PM on April 4, 2004