How does stuff get 'leaked' before release?

1. "planned" leak to build hype & get the artist talked about again
2. a label employee gets an advance, gives it to a friend or relative, who then wants to show off her/his status to various and sundry, and they shared with two friends, and they shared with two friends, and so on, and so on.

you think some dude in the mailroom or some assistant in the graphics department thinks to him/herself as he/she is uploading the new eminem album, "shit, if i leak this cd on the internet, that's going to hurt the company economically, and then they'll have to tighten their belts, and i might get laid off"? i think not.

fair enough, but are companies really that loose with the new masters they've got kickin' around? i guess i just wanna know--cuz in all fairness i have no idea--is it really that easy for the mailroom guy to get his hands on the stuff?

... some recent advances that i've received that i just cannot play on my computer without the thing getting spit out immediately: Hope of the States, Le Tigre...

They do that already. Also advance discs with "snippets" of songs, and advance discs with annoying interruptions in the songs every minute telling you the disc is the property of So-and-So and copying it is illegal, etc. All of which options are completely fucking useless from a reviewing perspective. I generally refuse to listen to them, and I hope I'm not the only one. (Even lamer is the "invite reviewer down to record company office to listen to advance in completely antiseptic artificial environment" option, obviously.)

maybe not a secret-service-protected u2 or jay-z album, but a typical hit album, i think yeah. i don't work at a label so i can't give you an inside scoop, but it's pretty clear to me that that's one of the basic perks of working at one. which is really not at all surprising.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0431/smith.php

Haha! I need to hear this!

I work in video games, and I've been told that our advance copies of games have the name of the publication and/or freelance writer written into the code sometimes, so they can identify it later....maybe this wouldn't be possible with MP3s, though (I'm not that familiar with the technology)

the games industry is pretty proactive about piracy, and are probably better equipped to deal with it because of the proprietary OS and technology in home consoles....but it's still fairly easy to do and a big problem in Asia...PC games are pretty susceptable..

Yeah, honestly, I wouldn't be suprised if they start doing this...in games, if someting like that happened and they tracked the code to a specific magazine, it could potentially be deadly to the pub, if you got pulled off all of the distrubution lists....

in-studio security is a pressing issue right now that took a lot of professionals by surprise. it used to be fairly easy to monitor who was making copies of a master in a studio, the practice would tie up a dubbing deck, and copies usually had to be made in real time (high speed copiers existed, but they were usually kept out of the control room). an unethical engineer who wanted to snake copies of rough mixes ran a high risk of drawing attention to himself.

these days anyone with a USB hard drive key can transfer over files in the background in a matter of seconds while staying busy in the foreground; in fact their job very well might be file management & backup, it will look like they are doing their job. it is conceivably not even the engineer at fault; anyone smart enough to know how to drag the right folder to their iPod while someone's looking away can have a day's worth of rough mixes copied over in under two minutes. security has become a nightmare for studios.

when albums are remixed, the original 2" inch reels are often transferred to digital; a 24 track song at 44.1/16bits usually takes less than one gig of space; given ten minutes and a hard drive, you can grab the complete multitracks for an entire album. and this is certainly happening, I've heard a lot of interesting things in the last two years that I'd love to mention but I don't want friends to lose jobs.