How to fight an album leak
It is an awful feeling when you want to support a group by buying their music, but have to stare down a link to a record you really want. You would love to give the group the money but because they won’t be proactive and offer it for sale, you download the record and forget to buy it when it comes out since two months later you aren’t as enthusiastic towards the record or you may find yourself broke.
This is a common situation today. A record leaks before its release date, and fans who don’t want to pay for it have it before fans who do. That’s not how things should work. The above is a quote from an article by Jesse Cannon, manager of a pop punk band called Man Overboard. His article details how the band and its label turned the leak from a disadvantage into an advantage. It should be instructive to bands and labels in all genres of music.
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The Leak
The leak happened about a month before the release date. It occurred because of a music journalist – the way I hate most. It gives the profession a bad name and hurts the artists one ostensibly supports.
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The Solution
Man Overboard and their label Run for Cover didn’t throw up their hands when the leak happened. Instead, they moved up the release date of the record. They monitored Tumblr and Twitter to gauge demand for it, then acted when demand was peaking.
First, they got the record up on iTunes within 48 hours. Then they got busy with social networking, including, most importantly, driving fans to their Bandcamp. Fans could buy the record digitally – ahead of the original release date – and pre-order CD and LP packages that came with free download codes. As a purchase incentive, the digital album on Bandcamp included an exclusive bonus track. The LP added another exclusive bonus track.
Evidently fan response was overwhelmingly positive. Not only did the band and label not bitch/moan/sue about the leak, they one-upped it. They offered purchase options more attractive than the leak. More importantly, they didn’t make fans face the download-or-wait dilemma.
Not all bands and labels can do this. Some have cumbersome business machinery operating behind them. Others might have a reason for making fans wait (e.g., a marketing strategy with a buildup over time). But for bands and labels willing and able to be light on their feet, Man Overboard offer a great case study in dealing with leaks.
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On-Demand Pressing
Reader post-felix alerted me to another possible solution in this arena. He went to buy Early Graves’ Goner on Amazon here. In the product description, he noticed this phrase:
This product is manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media
He did some sleuthing and found this explanation of Amazon’s print-on-demand system. Through a subsidiary called CreateSpace, Amazon will manufacture “books, DVD’s, CD’s, video downloads, and Amazon MP3’s” for merchants when customers order them. Evidently such CD’s and DVD’s are fully packaged with artwork. This reminds me of The New York Times‘ experiments (e.g., West Coast, Bay Area editions) with sending content electronically elsewhere to be printed locally in those places.
Of course, this only works with digitizable content. Due to the nature of vinyl pressing (the necessity of test presses, etc.), I don’t see LP’s being printed on demand. But maybe LP’s with distribution in the US and the EU can/do get pressed separately in each locale instead of manufacturing in one place, then shipping to the other – can anyone with knowledge weigh in on on this?
So Metal Blade/Ironclad aren’t manufacturing Early Graves CD’s and sending them to Amazon for shipment from their warehouses. They’ve just sent the digital files for the artwork/audio to CreateSpace/Amazon, who will take care of the manufacturing (for a fee, of course). This creates potential savings in terms of environmental impact (materials used only when needed, less shipping things around) and time. Metal Blade/Ironclad don’t have to worry about calculating inventory – and if the record leaks, they could just move up the release date.
