Taylor Swift’s album Lover was pretty much the only thing anyone could talk about last week. After weeks of Easter eggs and album hints, the internet was ready to pop off at its release. The problem? It leaked nine hours before it was supposed to, which set off a social media hurricane.
But here’s a question. How do albums, in this case Taylor’s, *actually* end up on the internet early? Brittany Hodak, a speaker and cofounder of The Superfan Company, worked with Taylor and her team on the launch of the Red album, so she explained how this probably went down.
How did the leak actually happen?
Great Q. In an age when you probably listen to all your music digitally, it’s easy to forget that physical copies of Taylor’s album were created and shipped all over the world so they could be ready for purchase on the street date, aka the day the album launched. Think about the amount of people who would have had access to the CDs before the official drop.
“I’m not sure how many different continents they were manufacturing music on, but it was certainly more than one, probably more than two,” Hodak explains. “And to have all of that be moving around the globe is...it’s an entire logistical operation that most fans never even think about or need to know about.”
With a lesser-known artist, CDs can sit in warehouses for weeks before a launch. Taylor and her team probably worked majorly hard (and paid a lot of $$, like millions and millions) to make sure that didn’t happen, but there is still a margin for error. Hodak’s guess is the upload originated outside of the United States and happened because someone got their hands on a physical copy. It could have been someone in retail, shipping, or logistics.
How big of a nightmare can a leak be?
It depends on how early it happens, TBH. In this case, Hodak says Lover hit the internet within 12 hours of the official launch (it’s hard to pinpoint when the first link popped up). That might sound like a catastrophe, but it’s actually a major win.
“It would have been a very different conversation if it had leaked a week early or 10 days early or even 3 days. The fact that they were able to get so close to street date without it happening is, quite frankly, a miracle,” she says.
Plus, Taylor and her team made sure there were plenty of other things happening last Thursday to distract from a potential leak. For example, Taylor performed on Good Morning America, she did a YouTube Live, and the “Lover” music video premiered. Her fans had lots of other stuff to talk about, so the album’s accidental release wasn’t the only thing making headlines.
Can anyone do anything about it once it does leak?
Yes! There’s most likely an entire team of people at Taylor’s record label that tried to prevent this from happening and then did everything they could to minimize the damage once it did happen.
“There are entire teams at record labels, they call them takedown teams, and their job is to just get those links deactivated and buried from search engines....They were probably having those pulled in real time as they were being shared,” Hodak says.
Plus, Taylor’s own fans were going crazy trying to get people to stop talking about the album once it was put online illegally, so there’s that.
Serious question, would someone ever leak their *own* album to create buzz or hype?
Someone? Sure. Taylor? No. She’s the master at releasing an album, so you can bet your ass she had a very specific plan for the rollout and it did not include accidental early streaming. That doesn’t mean her team wasn’t prepared for it, but Hodak says that even though she didn’t work with Taylor on this album release, she can almost guarantee it was not intentional. Guess that settles that!
How much does this impact the overall sales of an album though?
For an artist as big as Taylor, the actual impact on album sales is probably virtually none, Hodak says. Her fans are still going to buy and stream her album till the end of time. But someone still stole her work and uploaded it illegally, which isn’t cool. Either way, Lover slaps, and that’s that on that.
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August 27, 2019 at 12:45AM
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