Wilco Stops Trying To Plug Leaks And Posts Full Advance Album Stream
Is there any way to stop pre-release leaks? Wilco smartly decided to stop trying. In an email to fans, the band wrote:
"Well, we made it nearly a month with copies of Wilco (the album) floating around out there before it leaked. Pretty impressive restraint in this day and age. But the inevitable happened last night. Since we know you’re curious and probably have better things to do than scour the internet for a download (though we do understand the attraction of the illicit), we’ve posted a stream of the full album at http://wilcoworld.net/records/thealbum/. Feel free to refer to it as “wilco (the stream)” if you must.""We also have our usual guilt abatement plan for downloaders. If you have downloaded the record, we suggest you make a donation to one of the band’s favorite charities, the Inspiration Corporation–an organization we’ve supported in the past & who are doing great work in the city of Chicago. Information and donation button here: http://inspirationcorp.org/."
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Bruce-
I would respectfully suggest that it’s a little misleading to say that Wilco has stopped trying to plug leaks–the band historically does not, in fact, try to stop leaking. What they do is wait until they notice the album has been leaked, then post a stream of the album themselves. I believe they’ve been doing this since A Ghost is Born, although I could be wrong about that. That’s why they made the comment about “impressive restraint”: they have not been actively out there trying to shut down anything, they’ve just been observing. They’d prefer the album not be leaked, but they also know it’s going to happen at some point.
Having a stream of an album on the artist’s official website is what I call good marketing. That way, anybody who is interested at least a bit for whatever reasons, can have a listen, even a repeat listen, and get accustomed to the sound of the album that way. The hooklines of the songs will then be memorized by the listener and the appetite in the actual CD is whet.
I might not have taken the risk to buy “Witness” by Nathaniel Street-West a few years ago if he hadn’t had a stream of it on his website, having never heard of him before.
But streaming the whole album is kind of like in a record store where they had players standing around so you can have a listen. It’s right there where musical taste and love for music are developed.
Nowadays, going to the record store isn’t as exciting anymore because you cannot listen to anything more than just the 30 second streaming sound samples that are online at iTunes, amazon, and the other online sellers as well.
But 30 sec sound samples are better than nothing at all.