This is interesting. The US press are reporting that Beyonce's 'B'Day Anthology Video Album' has become the first music DVD to be seriously illegally distributed online ahead of release. Pretty much every album appears in the ether before even its official digital release these days, of course, via both P2P and fan blogs, and normally in user friendly MP3, rather than the DRMed formats that come with any official major label release. But the unofficial distribution of video clips off music DVDs online has been less common, but apparently lots of footage from the Beyonce DVD was circulating online ahead of its 3 Apr release - via file-sharing networks and emerging video blogs, again often in a non-DRMed format, generally the iPod friendly MPEG4.
It's another interesting challenge for the record companies - especially with the bloggers who are posting this kind of content ahead of release - because on the one side many labels recognise the increasing importance opinion forming bloggers have in promoting new music, and as a result are starting to service them with promo CDs, but on the other hand the same labels are increasingly wary of the unlicensed music that appears on these blogs, and are likely to get even more concerned if the bloggers start to post increasing amounts of DVD content ahead of release. Quite what strategy they take to deal with that challenge remains to be seen.