James Delahunty
21 Feb 2005 17:28
Well, it has happened again (and nobody is one bit surprised). We all saw the media attention surrounding the leak of the Eminem - Encore album several weeks before its release date. Interscope got so worried about the Internet leak that they brought the release date forward a couple of weeks fearing that Internet piracy would hit the albums sales hard. After that we also saw the latest U2 album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb arrive first, not in stores, but all over the Internet.
Now the latest album to surface weeks before its release is 50 Cent's new album The Massacre. The album is set to be released on March 8th 2005, but there is already a retail copy of the 22 track album available online for download. Apparently another copy has been available for a matter of days but at much lower quality. This copy is ripped straight from a retail CD into high quality MP3 files.
The runtime of the album is approximately 1h 17min. It's encoded as VBR MP3 audio which produces much higher quality than CBR 128kb/s mp3 which is mainly found on P2P networks like Kazaa (usually MP3 rips that have been around since Napster). The album is currently appearing on the Internets biggest P2P networks, IRC and of course BitTorrent sites.
There is no doubt that Interscope will be very frustrated about this leak, as today is only February 22nd, a whole 14 days before the albums retail release. Perhaps we will see legal digital copies of the album appear on some of the biggest online music stores like iTunes and Napster in the next few days, as I'm sure rap fans will want to get their hands on this new album quickly, and are not too concerned about the legality of the method they use.
Source:
AfterDawn