It was horrible.” Rather than release music already floating around the internet in a half-finished state, the trio shelved the record. You want your fans to hear it all together, you want to be able to put out your work your way. All the things we sang about were personal. “The effort, the time, the sweat, all the days in the studio that went into making those songs – it was all for nothing. Having any sense of agency ripped away hurt more than the financial blow, she says. The amount we spent trying to get this album together, only for it to leak and for us to not have the chance to make any money from it … It’s too depressing to think about.” We still have no idea how it happened,” she recalls. “Fans started messaging me links to the leak.
The former Sugababes singer and member of cult pop group MKS was at home for Christmas in 2016 when a demo version of a comeback album surfaced online. Mutya Buena says she knows exactly where Jai Paul is coming from. “The hardest thing to grasp was that I’d been denied the opportunity to finish my work and share it in its best possible form … having dream torn up in front of me hit me pretty hard.” Not everyone, in other words, is able to react with the nonchalance of Radiohead. “No one else seemed to view the situation in the same way I did: as a catastrophe,” he wrote in an open letter. Returning with his first music since 2013 this month, he told of how he suffered a “breakdown of sorts” and “withdrew from life”, consumed by trauma and grief. Jai Paul, the influential R&B star in the making, was similarly distressed after his debut album was hacked and posted in full online, and he disappeared from public view for six years. “There are no words to describe how devastated I was,” she told the New York Times. This month, Madonna said she “felt raped” after her 2015 album Rebel Heart leaked online before she’d even announced it. Less has been made of the emotional trauma of the artists who’ve seen music, often unfinished, stolen from their private vaults and uploaded without consent. One report by the Institute for Policy Innovation, an American thinktank, estimated that internet users have downloaded $12.5bn worth of pirated music every year since 1999. The move was heralded as a victory for artists and a middle finger to pirates, who for two decades have derailed album release campaigns by uploading illegally obtained music, often months in advance.Ī lot has been written about the financial cost of leaks since the advent of sites such as Napster. “Instead of complaining – much – or ignoring it,” Greenwood wrote on social media, “we’re releasing all 18 hours on Bandcamp in aid of Extinction Rebellion.” Minutes later, a waking day’s worth of untitled, unedited offcuts and demos appeared on the streaming service for fans to sift through. The group responded to the threats with a shrug.
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