3 Iconic Albums That Were Leaked on the Internet

Leaked albums are nothing new. Where there’s an intersection of music and the internet, there are going to be some albums that slip through the cracks. Especially in the early 2000s when piracy was all the rage. Here are three iconic albums that were leaked before their release date.

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‘X&Y’ by Coldplay

In 2005, a week before Coldplay‘s album X&Y was scheduled to release, the entire album was leaked on the internet. Allegedly, the leak occurred after copies of the album were sent to U.K. radio stations. Fans were able to illegally download all 12 tracks. While Coldplay’s record company, EMI, attempted to put a stop to the leak, there was essentially nothing they could do.

However, EMI then made reviewers sign an NDA before receiving the album. The leaked album was then released to reviewers under the fake name “The Fir Trees”. It was also personally handed over by EMI representatives. Before the official release date of June 6, Coldplay made the album available to listen on their website, hoping to persuade fans from downloading it instead.

‘Icky Thump’ by The White Stripes

The White Stripes‘ album Icky Thump wasn’t technically leaked on the internet, but it was played in full on a radio station prior to its release. In 2007, Chicago radio station Q101 got hold of Icky Thump before it’s June 15 release date. DJ Electra played the leaked album in full over the airwaves at 2 p.m., then two hours later Jack White called her from Spain.

“Jack asked me to take responsibility for leaking the record and asked if I was sorry for what I’d done,” Electra wrote in a 2007 blog post, per a report from NME. “We tried to explain where we were coming from – someone gave us a copy of a record that we were really excited to play, and the whole experience was an hour-long love-fest for him and his band – but he wasn’t having it. He hung up, very, very angry, and I thought I was going to cry.”

‘Hail To The Thief’ by Radiohead

About 10 weeks before Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief was set to release in 2003, the album was leaked online. But it wasn’t the entire finished album. Instead, someone got ahold of rough demos and unmixed songs from the album from earlier in the year.

On Radiohead’s online forum, Jonny Greenwood posted that the band were “pissed off” about the leaked album. However, it wasn’t the fact that the album was leaked that made them angry. It was more about the unfinished quality of the leak.

While Colin Greenwood said that the leak was like “being photographed with one sock on when you get out of bed in the morning,” he also disapproved of the cease-and-desist orders EMI was sending out.

“Don’t record companies usually pay thousands of dollars to get stations to play their records? Now they’re paying money to stations not to play them,” he told Q magazine in 2003.

The leak and EMI’s response led Radiohead to release their next album, In Rainbows, independently online.

Photo by John Shearer/WireImage for Warner Bros. Records