Copyright Law

Broken Bells New Album Leaks to BitTorrent

Highly anticipated collaboration between Danger Mouse and James Mercer of The Shins' debuts on BitTorrent tracker sites well ahead of its March 9th, 2010 release date.

I mentioned a few days ago how Danger Mouse of The Grey Album fame, among many other things, and The Shins' James Mercer have teamed up to form a new band called Broken Bells with a forthcoming self-titled album due to be released March 9th of next year.

As part of a promotion for the new project they made one of the tracks – “The High Road” – available as a free download for fans.

Apparently one track wasn’t enough for some and the entire – yes, the entire album – has debuted on BitTorrent tracker sites everywhere.

The tracklist is as follows:

01. The High Road

02. Vaporize

03. Heads On Fire

04. The Ghost Inside

05. Sailing To Nowhere

06. Trap Doors

07. Citizen

08. Float

09. The Waiting Game

10. The Mall And Misery

I’m a big fan of Danger Mouse and hope this unexpected leak doesn’t discourage him from projects in the future, but just in case I plan to purchase a copy and hope any of you whom download a copy do so as well.

Considering how his spat over distribution of Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night of the Soul played out something tells me he’s more concerned with just creating good music for fans of his to enjoy.

Unable to resolve disagreements with his record label EMI he began selling a blank recordable CD-R version labeled "for Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music" that added "use it as you will" (copies are currently selling for upwards of $125 on Amazon).

"Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the recorded music for Dark Night Of The Soul without fear of being sued by EMI,” said a spokesman for Danger Mouse at the time.

The album was then soon mysteriously available for free streaming on the NPR website, and after a bit of reverse engineering, was copied and made available for free download on BitTorrent tracker sites everywhere, so Danger Mouse certainly isn’t immune to controversy and leaked albums.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on December 26, 2009 (boomark / email).