What was the first album to be secretly leaked online?
The world of online music distribution is, according to most musicians, a treacherous cave of depravity, greed and slovenly scandal.
The internet, and its many advantages, may well have provided every single garage band from here to the ends of the universe with a platform to distribute their music to the world, but it has rarely done much else than provide a platform. the kind of platform you see in video games, where one false move means you plummet to your death.
The lack of royalties and respect that comes with such a wide net means that the streaming world is getting a rough ride. While it can be easy to daydream about the peak of CD sales in the 1990s, when a significant hit single could set you up for life, that decade also had its issues, and we don’t just mean S Club 7.
So we’re diving back into one moment in rock history that changed the very nature of music as we know it. In 1993, and buoyed by the success of their seminal 1990 LP Violator, Depeche Mode set about creating and producing their follow-up full-length album Songs of Faith and Devotion. The album would be a landmark record for the group, selling thousands of LPs and sending the band to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic for the first time.
It was a moment the group had been striving for across their entire career, the moment they actualised into a full-on rock giant of a band. However, the record had another unexpected title to its name, the very first album to be secretly leaked online.
The magic of online music distribution should never be diminished beyond its prevailing quality: making more music available to more people, which, as music lovers, we should all be happy about to a degree. However, we have a larger problem at play when a record is stolen and secretly released without the artist’s permission. This is exactly what happened to David Gahan and the boys from Basildon, Depeche Mode.
Steve Knopper wrote in Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry of the despicable moment. The recordings from the band’s sessions, which had now been formed into songs and tracklisting, were beginning to circulate online within chat rooms. A secretary nervously announced this to the band and received a barrage of bemused expressions; this was pirating material in a way nobody had ever experienced before. Their music hadn’t just been lifted and pressed onto a run of bootlegs, sold in pubs or out the back of cars; it had been pushed out to the world via the internet. While that pool was pitiful in comparison to online users today, it still represented a significant breach of trust and began a worrying trend.
Jeff Gold, the vice president of Warner, didn’t even know what a chat room was, and he wasn’t in the minority. In 1993, universities largely used the internet’s very rudimentary incarnation as a show of technology and to share exam results as opposed to any large proportion of the population using it. Gold signed up to an online service provider, CompuServe, and began to investigate.
Was it all bad news?
While the songs from Depeche Mode’s new album Songs of Faith and Devotion were being shared around in .wav and MP2 variants, something more interesting was happening. The band had stumbled onto a guerrilla-marketing gold mine.
Gold noted that the few people sharing the unreleased songs were nothing compared to the swell of publicity and excitement surrounding them. He also noted, through weeks of ‘lurking’ in chat rooms, that he could garner a huge dose of public opinion on any marketing very quickly and without much effort. Gold became one of the first executives to connect with the internet earnestly, using chat rooms to preview songs and hold fan contests online.
It would seem that, as with almost every annoying detail in music history, there was a good and bad side to Depeche Mode’s songs being released online without their knowledge. While the leak may have given the green light to a swathe of online pirates to share music from their favourite artists illegally, it also provided the catalyst for musicians and their executives to connect with and listen directly to their fans, providing a better proposition for all involved.
