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Digital
Ninja Tune outs album leaker
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 19 July 2011
I was saying just the other day that one of the big hurdles for Grooveshark, as it tries to convince us all that it is a legal digital music service, is that you frequently find unreleased albums in its library, tracks you won’t find on any legitimate digital platform because they haven’t been distributed yet. Which allows more comparisons between Grooveshark and the file-sharing networks, even if the former can and does block access to that content when a takedown notice is issued. Illustrating my point, I noted that Toddla T’s ‘Watch Me Dance’ was in there, despite not being released until next month.
But that’s not what this story is about, we’re here to discuss the actual initial leaking of that Toddla T album that enabled it to appear in Grooveshark. Clearly it was leaked by someone, and that someone, says the label releasing the album, Ninja Tune, was Benjamin Jager at Backspin magazine in Germany. He wins the whole of the Backspin staff the chance to not receive any more Ninja Tune albums.
In a statement, the label said: “It was with considerable disappointment that we learnt in the last week that two records we have been working on have been leaked, despite the use of watermarked CDs. Toddla T’s ‘Watch Me Dance’ and Thundercat’s ‘The Golden Age of Apocalypse’ were both leaked from copies sent to the journalist Benjamin Jager at the offices of Backspin magazine in Germany”.
It continued: “The availability of these records online for free has meant a rush release of the digital version of Toddla’s record, which, after the years of work put in, will seriously affect the ability to make any kind of financial return from commercial release. No one at the magazine has yet taken responsibility for uploading these records to the internet, but until the situation is resolved, we will no longer be servicing Backspin with promo copies. It’s very hard for young, up and coming artists to make a living from their music. People uploading their music months before it is commercially available are not doing them any favours”.
It’s not the first time someone has outed a reviewer they believed to be behind an album leak. In 2009, Converge tweeted the name of a journalist they believed had leaked their ‘Axe To Fall’ album, urging fans to retweet the name to their own accounts.
