Collective anticipation

Introduction

On 25 December 2008, thousands of fans of the band Animal Collective were given a surprising Christmas present. Someone with advance access to the band’s highly anticipated ninth album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, had ripped a copy of the vinyl release to mp3 format, two full weeks before the LP was due to hit the stores. The band’s fans had been waiting for 2 months for the album to leak, and many of them took breaks from their holiday activities to download it. Matt Lawson and Patrick Beane, two fans of the band, found links to the leak on the Collected Animals (CA) messageboard, a site where hundreds of the band’s most fervent fans had been eagerly anticipating hearing the music for months. In interviews with these fans they recalled the Christmas album leak. ‘When MPP leaked on Xmas, that was insane,’ Matt remembers. ‘There was so much build-up, everybody was driving each other crazy talking about it constantly’ (Lawson, 2011, interview). ‘It was almost like a joke, everyone had been talking about “what if it leaks on Christmas?”’, Beane recalls. ‘The hype really hadn’t died down at all. It peaked with that leak. It was the perfect moment for it to happen’ (Beane, 2011, interview).

Like many other 21st-century music fans who spend a lot of time online, leaks have given Lawson and Beane unique perspectives regarding music acquisition and community. For Lawson, the CA messageboard plays a significant role:

These expectations extend to Lawson’s opinion about music’s commodity status as well. Downloading a leak is not the same thing as buying an album from a store, though fans often speak of them in a similar way. ‘I think if you’re a big enough fan, and have been looking forward to an album a lot, downloading that leak can be just as exciting and special as walking into a record store and buying it and tearing off the plastic,’ Lawson explained. For Beane, the Merriweather leak was a shared experience of the sort he had never before experienced, but one that recalls fans attending ‘listening parties’ at record stores on release days:

Lawson’s and Beane’s comments describe a small part of what has, over the past 15 years, become a widespread social phenomenon in popular music fan cultures: the eager anticipation not just for the release of a new album, but for the pre-release acquisition of that album’s digital leak.

Pre-release album leaks have not replaced official releases – quite often, fans justify downloading leaks by publicly documenting their subsequent purchases – but the processes by which they transpire have added new dimensions to commonly held ideas about music promotion and piracy, as well as the value and authenticity of the digital music object. To examine these phenomena, I focus on the fervent 3-month period of anticipation preceding the release of Merriweather Post Pavilion as a case study illuminating how fan engagement with and through digital music technologies is redefining the music commodity. I examined dozens of messageboard threads, blog posts, reviews, and interviews about the incident and the social actors who participated, and conducted several interviews with some of the band’s most diehard fans from the CA messageboard, and select others whose actions during Merriweather’s pre-release period serve to clarify certain contingencies of music exchange in the digital era.

By 2008, Animal Collective had become one of the most noteworthy independent bands in existence. Their willingness to stylistically experiment with each new release won them widespread critical acclaim, and their frequent concert performances were traded by fans with the enthusiasm of Grateful Dead or Phish acolytes. As Lee Marshall (2003) claims, these ancillary trading markets for live recordings underscore a desire to connect with the artist outside the bounds of the recording industry. This connection functions to intensify ‘Romantic ideas about art and creativity which form the bedrock of the legitimate industry,’ which ‘give record industry commodities their value in the first place’ (Marshall, 2003: 69–70). The clear difference between tape-trading and leak downloading, however, is that while the former objects are not intended to circulate on the commercial market, the latter are. Though anticipating and seeking leaks may intensify fans’ connection to the artists despite the label’s wishes, the action is most often viewed as directly impinging on the commercial performance of the recording itself, given that leaked music files are close to indistinguishable from officially released material.

Animal Collective’s label, the powerful UK indie Domino Records, knew that Merriweather was going to be hotly anticipated, and thus took significant steps to protect it from leaking before it was due to arrive in stores in January 2009. I focus on two events that transpired in the absence of a leak that emphasize how affect drives music circulation during pre-release periods, and demonstrate ways in which it is regulated by a variety of social actors. In the first event, a single song leaked in November, via a French publication including it in their podcast. After another popular band publicized the leak, assuming it was sanctioned, a web security firm intervened, and the subsequent discourses blurred the lines between affective and illicit actions. A few weeks later, a messageboard member created a fake Merriweather leak that fooled many fans. The prank exploited the highly modular nature of the mp3 format in service of a larger point less about law than etiquette: downloading leaks is fine, but it should be done with a sense of decorum.

The incidents I examine are part and parcel of the widespread adoption of digital technologies throughout music cultures, which has brought to the fore the performative role of circulation in the creation of cultural meaning. Lee and LiPuma (2002) have coined the phrase ‘cultures of circulation’ to underscore that the shape of cultural objects performatively facilitates the manner in which they move between communities of interpretation, but also the manner in which they are taken up. As mp3 files escape from private promotional networks and course through online infrastructures, they create space for interpretative communities to emerge and discuss the music within a temporal framework previously only known to industry professionals such as DJs, record store owners, and journalists. Exemplified by messageboards, these communities ‘determine lines of interpretation, found institutions, and set boundaries based principally on their own internal dynamics’ (Lee and LiPuma, 2002: 192), not necessarily those dictated by professional codes or discursive norms.

Equally important is the fact that recordings encoded as mp3s do not maintain a standardized form as they move. Outside of professional guidelines or market conditions, digital leaks take distinct new shapes depending on their mode of circulation and the ends to which they are engaged. In Gaonkar and Povinelli's (2003) terminology, this is not a simple matter of translation, but transfiguration. In my first narrative, fans on a messageboard download a leaked album as a harmless affective gesture, while the band’s label sees the same act and the same object through the legal lens of copyright infringement. This perceptual gap is not traversable through recourse to a singular meaning expressed in different language. The role of the recording has been transfigured as the digital files escape distribution paths and move through the generative matrices provided by file-sharing networks, search engines, and web-based filehosting sites. These matrices create expectations, not only that leaks will take place, but also that they will make themselves known in particular ways. I address this phenomenon in my second narrative, as a messageboard prankster exploits the transfigurations of form occasioned by mp3s and online infrastructures to draw attention to the high levels of anticipation created through these infrastructurally mediated expectations. What appears to Animal Collective fans as the object of their desire – the leak – is to the prankster and the messageboard community nothing but a comedic prop. The meaning of the recording is mapped by this circulation, and recognized as it turns up in particular communities of interpretation. Though I recognize that Animal Collective’s music has significant value as culture to the band’s fans, for my current purposes, I am mainly interested in transfiguration through circulation, or ‘grasping mapping functions rather than meaning’ (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 2003: 394).

In the 21st century, digitally mediated cultures of circulation and transfiguration have eliminated certain taken-for-granted assumptions about selling music. Labels have long relied on artificial scarcity of recorded musical objects to create anticipation for their appearance on the market. Jonathan Sterne (2012: 188) claims that digital recordings have largely eradicated this guarantee. ‘The worldwide proliferation of mp3 files announces the end of the artificial scarcity of recorded music,’ Sterne contends. Digitization, he argues, ‘reopens the social organization of music – and the infrastructure that supports it – as a social question’. As I will show, mp3s do not work alone in this reopening, but flow through online platforms, websites, and search engines, most often powered not by market logic, but affect. As Rodman and Vanderdonckt (2006: 246) suggest, a purely economic perspective on the circulation of mp3s ‘reduces a multi-faceted phenomenon to a single issue: financial loss resulting from the theft of intellectual property’. Like these authors, I focus instead on the ‘affectively charged social relationships’ (Rodman and Vanderdonckt, 2006: 249) that emerge when people engage with flows of digital music outside the direct aegis of the recording industry.

Animal collective traverse the new media landscape

Animal Collective provide a unique case study to address digital technology’s impact on music cultures in the first decade of the 21st century. The group’s first album was issued as a limited pressing of intricately decorated compact discs in 2000, a crucial transitional period for the recording industry. While compact discs were still the primary media technology for distributing music, the peer-to-peer filesharing network Napster was peaking at this point, and mp3s would soon start dictating the shape of the recording industry. From their humble beginnings as an avant-garde act forged in New York City’s ‘noise-rock’ scene, Animal Collective grew along with the web’s affordances for support of arty, small-level acts. As internet bandwidth and computer processor speeds grew, fans took advantage of user-friendly blogging and messageboard platforms, which coupled with cheap server space, brought mp3 traffic and music discourse onto the web in significant numbers. In the journalistic realm, the website Pitchfork, started in 1995, exemplified the rise of just-in-time music reviews and news. Print publications such as Spin and Rolling Stone spent much of the decade fading in influence and trying to adapt to a profitable online format, while the web-native Pitchfork steadily grew. ¹ In 2006, a Wired article noted Pitchfork’s newfound status as a music tastemaker: ‘Pitchfork has found its own way to thrive in an industry that is slowly being niched to death: It influences those who influence others’ (Itzkoff, 2006). In broad terms, by the middle of the decade, the everyday activities of listening, sharing, promoting, releasing, discussing, and buying music were being done by millions of globally dispersed fans on personal computers and via web browser interfaces.

As Pitchfork grew, Animal Collective was gradually shaping its music into something with a wider appeal. Starting with their 2004 LP Sung Tongs, which Pitchfork reviewer Dominique Leone (2004) compared to the Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel, the band incorporated aspects of psychedelia, electronic music, and folk rock into a sound and style that appealed greatly to the site’s readership. According to Editor-in-Chief, Mark Richardson (2011, interview), Pitchfork became ‘a place where this conceivably strange music was being interpreted and explained’. It was also a space where Animal Collective’s reputation and influence were created and quantified: between 2000 and 2009, the site awarded the band’s releases increasingly high ratings on its 101-point system, in which albums are scored from 0.0 to 10.0. In the independent recording industry within which Animal Collective circulates, Pitchfork ratings have become a key arbiter of an album’s prospects for success. 2007’s Strawberry Jam–awarded a 9.3 rating and the Best New Music designation by Pitchfork–was the band’s most successful album yet, but advance press for Merriweather indicated that their ninth album would be even bigger. An interview in July 2008 with producer Ben Allen, whose credits included pop heavyweights such as Christina Aguilera and Gnarls Barkley, revealed that he was working on Merriweather (Brown, 2008). Fans were not put off by this news, however – they had learned to trust the band’s instincts. ‘Everyone was like “let’s do a background check on this guy,”’ Beane recalls. ‘“Who’s he been involved with? He’s a hip-hop producer?” Everyone just freaked out about that’ (2011, interview).

Merriweather would go on to sell 130,000 copies by the end of 2009 – very respectable sales numbers for a challenging art-rock album with little traditional promotional support – and would win the Village Voice’s critics poll as album of the year by a significant margin. Yet it was clear to many observers that what Animal Collective had achieved was what critic Mike Barthel (2009) explained as ‘not actual success, but Internet success, which is a different beast entirely.’ He explains:

Barthel employed some poetic license in his distinction between ‘real’ and ‘internet’ forms of success in the ‘modern musical enterprise’, but the differences are important. Animal Collective began the decade, and its career, as a tiny duo on the fringes of New York City’s avant-garde scene circulating via small numbers of CDs to an art-world crowd. It exited the decade as something quite different: a quartet that built its success on the affordances of a nascent music web. Like many such acts, Animal Collective’s sales numbers are not the most reliable metric by which to judge their value. The manner in which they achieved their small measure of fame is much more interesting to unpack.

A new type of online hype

On 8 October 2008, Animal Collective posted a mysterious video on their website, containing what most assumed to be the track listing for a new album. For the band’s fans, it was the first tantalizing taste of a forthcoming commodity. Quickly, a CA member started a discussion about it. Across hundreds of posts over the next few hours, members eagerly speculated about a new release from their favorite band. Anticipation for something new had been building on the board over the past year or so, fueled by new songs the band had been performing live. By the time Domino confirmed the track listing and release date in a press release issued the next day, the thread had grown to more than 250 posts. This new information immediately triggered a shift in the thread’s discourse. In quick succession, CA member jonothon asked, ‘so you guys think we’ll get the link in time for christmas [sic]?’ Weetigerstigers followed with ‘Think we’ll get the leak in time for Thanksgiving?’, to which Jay responded: ‘anyone think it’ll leak in time for tomorrow?’ CA member Kitt Kat offered a bit of practical context. ‘With press release … comes promo albums … we’ll have the album by mid-november [sic]’ (‘This thread … ’, 2008). Animal Collective fans count on albums leaking ahead of their release dates, and the promotional period for a new album is often occupied by a new type of anticipatory affect: an eagerness to acquire a digital leak of the recording as soon as possible.

Pre-release leaks are temporal and technological transfigurations of music recordings, occasioned by the mp3 format and a consistently mutating online infrastructure that has been appended to existing distribution networks. While bootleg copies of highly anticipated, unreleased (or shelved) recordings have circulated on the fringes of the recording industry for decades (Heylin 1994; Kernfeld 2011; Marshall 2003), the digital turn has both radically transformed the process and turned it into an aspect of everyday musical practice. On messageboards and within file-sharing communities, there is often a drive to acquire a leak as soon as possible, the ‘countdown’ often beginning as soon as an album is formally announced. This compulsion has roots in the ‘zero day’ culture of software pirates in ‘warez’ communities, in which participants race to disable the copy protection of retail software packages (‘crack’) and upload them to private sites on the same day they are released to stores. Rehn (2004) classifies the warez scene as a subcultural honor economy, in which being the first to obtain, crack, and upload a highly anticipated software release results in the acquisition of status within the community.

Because unlike software, recorded music relies on advance promotional circulation, the ‘zero day’ of a music leak often happens well in advance of its official release date. Most often, this results from it escaping through any number of fissures in the pre-release distribution chain: recording or mastering studios, pressing or distribution plants, and the promotional copies mailed to reviewers and DJs. While leaks often originate from inside secretive pirate networks commonly referred to as ‘the scene’ (Beekhuyzen, 2009: 173) after having been fed by anonymous industry insiders, Merriweather was different. According to a CA thread, a member of another messageboard had received the official Merriweather vinyl as a preorder, and ripped it to mp3s using a Numark turntable outfitted with a USB cable (‘order of … ’, 2008). Instantly, the mp3s proliferated on web-based filehosting sites such as Sendspace, Zshare, and Mediafire, via links posted on messageboards such as CA and swapped through various private channels. While many do seek to acquire status within BitTorrent or messageboard communities by being the first to post a link to a leak, as Sterne (2012: 213) explains, this is not often the case for the majority of online exchanges, within which recordings ‘are alienable; it does not matter who made them or ripped them. They carry no mark of the individual who passed them on’. ² In Merriweather’s case, a gift or honor economy does not provide the full context for circulation. In the hours and days after Merriweather’s leak hit the web, interested fans only needed to enter a simple search string into Google – typically the album name followed by ‘leak’ – for quick access.

In some ways, leaks recall an anticipatory musical ritual that dates back a century. Since the earliest moments of the music industries, entrepreneurs have provided the public ersatz access to music objects to stimulate demand for their subsequent commodified versions. ‘In one form or another, sound was the commodity the music industry trafficked in,’ David Suisman (2008: 11) explains, ‘and as a consequence auditory exposure was inseparable from promotion’ in the early 20th century. Promotion was initially carried out by song pluggers, usually a singer and pianist, who would play in public spaces after handing out slips of paper with the song choruses printed on them. Their goal was to engender a communal sing-along that would hopefully engender a deeper affective relationship with the song, which would then be consummated with a purchase of the sheet music (Suisman, 2008: 62–65). This strategy carried forth through the next 100 years. Whether through department stores, radio, television, jukeboxes, live performance, music videos, digital streams, or other ancillary media, music promotion has strived to embed ambient music advertising into all aspects of everyday life.

Yet before the digital music era, this process has been tightly controlled through technology, capital investment, professional relationships, and copyright law to ensure that ‘music products were “consumed” by people wherever and whenever the sounds were heard’ (Suisman, 2008: 14). There was a much stronger certainty that exposing the public to music would be enough to suggest its use values and engender the desire for an official exchange. Yet when promotion moved into the digital realm, the mp3 format’s unique commodity status created the possibility for a promotional transfiguration away from ambient suggestion and toward an ideology of ownership. ‘There is a sense in which the concept of the collection persists, along with the bourgeois sense of ownership that subtends it,’ Sterne explains of the mp3. ‘Users may be able to handle mp3s quite differently than the recordings they possess in larger physical forms like records or CDs, but they still talk about mp3s as things – things that are owned’ (2012: 214). Hearing a song on the radio or reading a review in a magazine or newspaper does not lead to the same sense of ownership. Exposure of this sort is meant as an affective trigger toward official exchange. Yet in the digital age, when pre-release music is ripped to the mp3 format and leaked to the internet it may still function promotionally, but gains an added dimension. As it moves from the promotional realm to individual users’ hard drives, it is often treated as a possession. Unlike taping a song off the radio, ripping an mp3 from a promotional CD, then tagging it properly and adding the artwork, results in a transfigured object largely indistinguishable from the sanctioned version.

This process of musical transfiguration represents a significant temporal shift and reorientation of power for music promotion. Specifically, pre-release digital leaks have exerted a profound effect on the production and circulation of that most concentrated form of music promotion: hype. Devon Powers describes the contested term as ‘a state of anticipation generated through the circulation of promotion, resulting in a crisis of value’ (2012: 863). In her examination of Bruce Springsteen’s rapid rise to fame in the mid-1970s, Powers unpacks the creation of musical hype arising from a confluence of journalism and promotion at the moment when rock music was undergoing a ‘full-scale industrialization’ that ‘placed new emphasis on both discursive and material forms of communication,’ and meant that ‘people and media who had quickly arisen to be necessities in turning rock music into a saleable commodity’ (2011: 206). Though most rock criticism at the time appeared in ‘alternative’ publications such as Rolling Stone, Creem, and The Village Voice, their discourses were absorbed into promotional operations as labels returned the favor with advance promotional copies of albums and concert tickets.

Conversely, the first decade of the 21st century has seen the vast de-industrialization of the recording industry and music journalism, and the concomitant deprofessionalization of established relationships and discourses. The primary task for unpacking hype in the digital era thus becomes uncovering the generation and aim of these dispersed discourses, which often take shape around leaks. Hype is no longer only an engineered, ‘top-down’ phenomenon between publicists and critics, but one that just as often emerges from blogs and messageboards populated by fans who enjoy the same advance access to recordings formerly exclusive to a select few. Pitchfork’s Richardson contends that messageboards and leaks grew together at the dawn of the 21st century:

This combination of advance access to music with a space to discuss it has democratized the role of the music critic and radio DJ, expanding pre-release discourses, both critical and affective, into the realm of everyday fandom.

In the opening paragraph of his glowing Merriweather review for Pitchfork, Richardson (2009) addressed the discourse that pervaded – and to a degree, defined – the months preceding the album’s release, ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion … has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak.’ Interviewing Richardson about his review 2 days later, a writer for Flavorwire noted ‘the hype around this thing out of the gate is unbelievable,’ quantifying the excitement by citing the discussion thread on the At Ease messageboard, which had reached a staggering 1075 pages (The Beard, 2009). The collective anticipation for the Merriweather leak metastasized across dozens of threads and thousands of posts on the CA board as well. According to CA member Kevin Niemann (2011, interview), the process generally proceeds as such: ‘people post a thread about an album, and it gradually picks up steam until everyone is demanding a leak, and when it finally leaks, people are immediately calling it the album of the year.’ Fellow board member Kyle Wyss remembers the Merriweather hype as a self-sustaining group event amongst Animal Collective’s fans:

Powers’ (2012) claim that hype results in a ‘crisis of value’ is especially relevant here. Wyss notes that, after all the tumult that predicated its leak, he came to the realization that Merriweather was in fact, ‘just an album.’

Emerging from the newsgroups, bulletin boards, and fansites of the 1990s, messageboards provide a social space for the creation of music community through unique forms of exchange and discourse. Users often find messageboards through strategic web searches for particular information, but those who stick around can find themselves identifying with a larger discursive community. Animal Collective fans use the CA board not only to discuss the work of their favorite band, but also to arrange meet-ups at concerts and trade different iterations of the band’s music, whether live and studio recordings, lyrics, or guitar tablatures. Until 2008, the band members themselves made periodic appearances on the board, offering detailed responses to fan questions. Yet because CA members are not compelled to subscribe to a uniform behavioral policy, many members’ interactions with band members started crossing a line. ‘A lot of the questions started to get too personal, or sort of hostile,’ Beane remembers. ‘People started posting pictures of (founding band member) Noah (Lennox)’s daughter at points’ (2011, interview). Indeed, bands themselves often appreciate the concentrated form of affect that often metastasizes on messageboards, though their fans’ actions on them often prove impossible to regulate.

A lack of etiquette often extends to how fans approach the promotion and circulation of their favorite band’s recordings, as well. In May 2007, Animal Collective and Domino attempted to engineer hype for the release of the Strawberry Jam album by incorporating the CA board into its promotional strategy. Band member Brian Weitz started a thread that granted members symbolic primacy to disseminate knowledge and enthusiasm about the forthcoming album. Tiziana Terranova dubs this kind of capitalist practice ‘digital labor’, in which ‘knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities, that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited’ (2004: 78). Indeed, though CA members relished their capacity as unpaid promotional delegates, Domino and the band soon learned that digital labor is a practice fraught with uncertainty. Though no one on CA was provided with promotional copies of the album, the messageboard was one of the earliest and most prominent sites where Jam leaks started appearing the next month. Someone on another messageboard was releasing the album three songs at a time, over a period of several weeks. Thread after thread emerged on CA, as users excitedly discussed the new music with each other as they listened for the first time. By 4 July, the entirety of the album had leaked, more than 2 months before it was due in stores. It was clear that while Animal Collective and Domino viewed CA as a culture of circulation that could be transformed into a responsible promotional outlet, the CA population did not view it as such.

Digital scarcity, the ‘Brother Sport’ leak, and Web Sheriff

Domino and Animal Collective kept relatively silent in the months leading up to Merriweather’s release, a strategy informed by the experience with Jam, and aided by the band’s newfound reticence toward publicity. There was no advance single or video for Merriweather, no press interviews, no YouTube clips, and a hard-line stance against anything that even looked like a leak. The only way to hear the album ahead of its release date would be to attend one of several private ‘listening parties’ in the US and UK during late November and early December. At these events, arranged by the music publicity firm Motormouth Media, attendees sat around loft-like spaces as the album played over a PA system, thus protecting the album from a leak while still promoting it – journalists in attendance wrote up what they heard the next day – and lending Merriweather a crucial aura of exclusivity.

Animal Collective is not alone in employing such a strategy. Across the cultural industries, from book publishing to film production, copyright holders have increasingly adopted stark measures to delimit the advance circulation of highly anticipated releases in the age of leaks. In his discussion of Scholastic’s attempts to synchronize the global release of a forthcoming book in the Harry Potter series, Ted Striphas (2009: 156) cites ‘the range and intensity of the labor necessary to create conditions of scarcity’ under such circumstances. For Scholastic, this strategy included requiring ‘that any bookseller or librarian … wishing to distribute copies of the latest Potter release sign an embargo agreement stipulating that the book would not be sold or loaned prior to its lay-down date’ (Striphas, 2009: 146), and shrouding the shipped books ‘in high-test opaque plastic’ prior to their security-laden delivery (Striphas, 2009: 149).

As has become standard in the promotion of highly anticipated music releases, Domino’s and Motormouth’s efforts to ensure Merriweather’s scarcity extended to the object itself. In Sterne’s phrasing, they ‘convert(ed) their desire for control over circulation from an ideological project to an engineering project’ (Sterne, 2012: 192), by embedding the promotional CDs with unique, inaudible watermarks, traceable back to any critic who might let a copy out of their grasp. Though it is hard to imagine a professional critic willing to tarnish her reputation or sully a professional relationship with such a clear transgression, the label and publicist invested in technological insurance. As it circulated, the Merriweather advance thus implicitly cited the label’s state-sanctioned authority to protect its property, a power granted it under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). As described by Tarleton Gillespie (2007: 177), the DMCA shifted copyright’s ‘traditional attention to delimiting copying to a new emphasis on regulating access’. In the Merriweather case, the technological regulation was not intended to restrict the album’s circulation through the market, but to ensure it remained within a strictly promotional frame.

Yet these technological assurances mean little if their ramifications are simply ignored. Domino serviced the French webzine Les Inrocks with copies of Merriweather around the middle of November, and someone working for the publication ripped ‘Brother Sport’ from the CD, and incorporated the full song into the site’s streaming podcast. Streams are often seen as a suitable way to safely circulate music online – though the music is public, its circulation is limited by being tethered to a website, with hyperlinks obscured by an audio player frontend. Within minutes of the podcast going live, however, it was transfigured. Fans captured the stream, extracted ‘Brother Sport’ as an mp3 file, and put the song into wide circulation, via Mediafire and Zshare, between email accounts and on the hidden sub-boards appended to messageboards. Bloggers seeking to capitalize on the wave of Google traffic the track was drawing embedded the mp3 on their sites. Writing about the leak in Pitchfork’s news section, Paul Thompson and Amy Phillips (2008) exposed the track to a wider audience. CA regular, Beane remembered the moment as a brief window when the song circulated under an undefinable logic: ‘Once “Brother Sport” was out there in some form, I think there’s just an understanding among anyone in the internet [sic] that it belongs to everyone, and it’s just up for grabs’ (2011: interview). With no immediate word from Domino or Animal Collective about the role of the podcast in their promotional plans, in the minutes and hours after the leak, the simple fact of ‘Brother Sport’s circulation was enough to validate it.

A blog post from another high-profile band would put ‘Brother Sport’s circulation to the test. The Brooklyn-based quintet Grizzly Bear were popular among similar groups of music fans and consumers as Animal Collective in late 2008, and the band’s singer and de facto blogger Ed Droste was very excited to hear ‘Brother Sport’. Having seen the mp3 in circulation the day of the leak, Droste wrote a quick post (which has since been deleted) on the Grizzly Bear blog, proclaiming his affection for the song and linking to a leak-hosting website. The day after the post went up, the band received an email from Web Sheriff, a London-based security firm hired by Domino for the Merriweather campaign. Likely because the band’s blog was so highly trafficked, they were named the ‘global-leak-source of the track,’ and ordered to replace the blog post with a pre-written apology to Animal Collective. Instead, Droste penned a 12-point explanation of his actions, which was picked up by Thompson and Phillips (2008) and reposted on the Pitchfork site. ‘The song was played on a French podcast … someone (not me) ripped the song. Many blogs posted the track. I was one of those blogs.’ Droste’s explanation reflected the confusion that many have about pre-release music in the digital age. ‘We thought this song had made its way to radio and blogs and was being used to promote their album,’ he explained. ‘It was meant to generate even more excitement for what surely will be a great album, and yes the Web Sheriff is just doing his job’ (cited by Thompson and Phillips, 2008).

A question many were asking around this time pertains to Droste’s last point: What exactly is Web Sheriff’s job? The splash page of the firm’s website features a large brass sheriff’s badge, emblazoned with the firm’s slogan: ‘Protecting Your Rights On The Internet.’ Among other duties, the outfit run by intellectual property attorney John Giacobbi scans the web for evidence of leaks during promotional periods. This is a process combining proprietary software and web crawlers with what Giacobbi describes as ‘a team of people that effectively sit there night and day making value judgments’ on whether a blog or messageboard post counts as an infringing act (cited in Cooper, 2011). The necessity of automating certain aspects of the process, combined with the many gray areas of digital music copyright make Giacobbi’s job an inexact science. Many bloggers are dumbfounded at receiving an automated Web Sheriff takedown notice posted in their comments section after having consulted directly with a label or artist to post an mp3 file. Web Sheriff is not alone in this practice, however. In 2010, Google shut down several music sites on its Blogspot platform via its ‘automated enforcement system’ (Van Buskirk, 2010) as a result of a complaints by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) cited the posting of unsanctioned mp3s. On one of these deleted blogs, the link had been long removed, an important criteria the automated system could not discern. The fault, writer Eliot Van Buskirk surmised, was ‘a combination of overzealous copyright interests who know not what they (or their bots) do, and laws that fail to distinguish between promoting something on a blog and sharing it on a file sharing network’ (Van Buskirk, 2010).

Though his moniker and image is that of an enforcer in the Old West model, Giacobbi is quick to distance his brand of enforcement from that of the IFPI. Indeed, Web Sheriff is hired as much for promotional consulting as copyright enforcement, and his notices to ostensible offenders mix legalese with marketing speak. ‘We’re not there to give people a hard time or to ruin their fun. Far from it,’ he told another interviewer. ‘We’re just there to reshape things’ (cited in Lewis, 2011). It might sound innocent, but the phrase ‘reshape things’ serves a distinct ideological purpose for the possibilities of music circulation. While Web Sheriff’s work to erase ‘Brother Sport’ from circulation after its leak may have ultimately been futile – simply renaming the file would allow it to circulate unnoticed – Giacobbi’s security effort and Grizzly Bear’s popularity combined to stir up much conversation about the song over the subsequent weeks.

The most interesting and lengthy of these discussions took place on the Collected Animals messageboard, on which members tried to sort out exactly what had happened. On a thread called ‘Grizzly Bear Take the Fall for “Brother Sport” Leak,’ fans attempted to untangle the events and assign blame, a process that revealed the blurry lines separating piracy and promotion, and the equally unclear roles and responsibilities of journalists and labels regarding leaked music. A few CA members claimed Domino and Web Sheriff were out of touch with the modern music climate: ‘This is why record labels are becoming obsolete, because they aren’t looking logically at how piracy works,’ one wrote, continuing: ‘Instead of worrying about the music leaking, they should be worrying about how to sell a cd an [sic] age where we can get any music we want for free.’ Another added, ‘The web sheriff can issue out emails to blogs … but that’s not where the leak will come from anyway … that’s just where it will end … record companies really don’t understand leaks.’ Others placed the fault with Pitchfork and Les Inrocks for violating journalistic protocols. ‘I’d love to see Pitchfork have to display the apology, imagine the hilarity,’ another wrote, continuing, ‘I don’t see why the [sic] shouldn’t – they did basically the same thing as GB [Grizzly Bear], and if GB are being called the “leak source”, which they aren’t, then Pitchfork must be as well’ (‘Grizzly Bear take … ’, 2008).

For some on the Collected Animals board, Web Sheriff was clearly providing more than security. ‘It seemed like a marketing tool, just absurd,’ suggested Beane (2011). ‘[It fed] into the mythology of this record, that it’s something that has to be policed, and kept secret, and not available until the big day.’ Striphas (2009: 154) notes that a similar phenomenon is happening in the book industry, where the previously distinct realms of promotion and control have merged: ‘given the relative lack of anything substantive to say about the books prior to their release, journalists have been forced to report on … security measures.’ It is unclear if Web Sheriff and Domino intended the public hubbub around ‘Brother Sport’ as free hype for Merriweather, yet Giacobbi’s own words offer evidence that this may be the case. ‘At the end of the day what we do is turn the perceived negative of anti-piracy to the positive function of viral marketing’ (cited in Cooper, 2011). In the emergent, unpredictable realm of Merriweather’s pre-release hype it was indeed tough to discern the role of the ‘Brother Sport’ rip. For Droste, his blog post was simply an eager musician trying to draw attention to an exciting new song from a respected contemporary. Yet Web Sheriff reframed that same action as the work of a ‘global leak-source’. The unanswerable question gets to the heart of pre-release music circulation and transfiguration of its function in the digital age: were they both serving the same promotional function?

I Love music, a rickroll, and the propriety of piracy

‘For the uninitiated, this message board can be an uninviting place,’ wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Endelman in 2006, listing the I Love Music (ILM) messageboard among the magazine’s list of the ‘25 Best Music Websites.’ ‘Threads are often filled with obscure Web slang, vicious flaming, and know-it-all ’tude,’ he explained. Like CA, ILM is a virtual community of music fans (though ILM counts a number of professional music journalists amongst its ranks) that is constructed through a particular style of ‘poetic world-making’, in Michael Warner’s (2002: 114) use of the phrase. ILM’s community is performatively enacted via participation in threaded discussions on a variety of topics, many of which may scan to outsiders as gobbledygook. To longtime members, however, ILM’s form of ‘obscure Web slang’ is not only easy to parse, but functions as the very linguistic foundation of a community built upon music discourse. Sometimes for instance, a particular word or phrase dropped in a discussion can refer to an in-joke that has been circulating through the board for years. To paraphrase Warner, ILM comprises a particular repertoire of affects; recognition of those affects is precisely what incorporates one into the myriad topical publics comprising the ILM community (Warner, 2002: 99–100). Like CA, ILM is a public messageboard, and is thus indexed by search engines. In early December, a month prior to the official release of Merriweather, one member decided to introduce some unwitting Animal Collective fans to the board’s unique sense of humor.

The ILM thread anticipating Merriweather had grown to several hundred posts by early December 2008. It had started with excitement following the early October announcement, moved on to a bit of discussion about the band’s history, and had slowed down for a couple weeks. On 18 November, news of the ‘Brother Sport’ leak revived the thread. Several members noted the event, but one member was not yet satisfied:

For those seeking an update with a link to the full album leak (via Rapidshare), reloading the Merriweather thread was a frustrating experience. Two weeks later, others were showing signs of fatigue:

The Merriweather thread was popular enough to gain the attention of ILM members who were not otherwise interested in the band. Browsing to the messageboard’s front page, visitors would notice the thread continually appearing at or near the top – a sign that it was attracting a lot of attention. One particularly active member decided to capitalize on this anticipation. ‘Animal Collective wasn’t really on my radar,’ admitted ILM regular Grady Gillian (Gillian, 2011: interview). ‘But everyone is foaming at the mouth waiting for this album to leak like no other album before. And I said, “oh, that’s perfect.”’

By early December, Domino had issued the album’s track list (including song durations) and its album art. The commodity had a definite shape, but the actual recording was still tantalizingly out of reach. Gillian used this information to create a fake version of Merriweather, as a prank at the expense of his ILM friends eager to download a leak. He did it in the style of a Rickroll, a popular online ‘click-and-switch’ hoax at the time. As described in Wired, a Rickroll ‘sends innocent Web users not to the promised link but to a YouTube video of (Rick Astley) the well-coiffed crooner from the 1980s’ (Brown and Leckart, 2011), singing his 1987 hit single ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’ Two weeks before Grady came up with his idea, Rickrolling had gone mainstream. During the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, Astley himself burst out of a float and broke into that very song, causing one of the puppets to exclaim: ‘I love Rickrolling’ (North, 2008)! The Rickroll is a prank meant to highlight (and gently mock) the propensity to seek instant gratification triggered by clicking a hyperlink coupled with provocative text. It was the perfect prank to tease those Animal Collective fans eagerly Googling for a Merriweather leak.

Gillian’s Merriweather Rickroll would not simply link to a YouTube clip, however. Instead, he crafted an intricate prank on leak-seekers that relied on the modular nature of the mp3 format and the brief window of hype for the album’s leak. He duplicated, looped, and cropped the audio of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ until it fit the exact running time of each Merriweather song, renamed the tracks accordingly, and embedded the album art in the track metadata using the iTunes software. He exported the files and created an archive of the folder with the extension .rar. He then uploaded the file to Sendspace and posted the following statement on ILM’s Merriweather thread:

Initially, the prank was only meant to fool Gillian’s ILM friends. That extra little bit – ‘my friend at Domino’ – was aimed specifically at those who knew Gillian. ‘I made posts before that,’ he explained, ‘I had friends who had cool jobs and lived in interesting parts of the world, so it wasn’t entirely out of character for me to … have a friend who worked for Domino Records who would have given me something like that’ (Gillian, 2011: interview). Falling for the prank meant waiting for the .rar file to download, using some archiving software to open it, and dragging that folder into an mp3 player such as iTunes, which transformed the file icons into a more recognizable series of properly tagged mp3s. Until clicking ‘play,’ downloaders were under the strictly visual assumption that they were in possession of a Merriweather leak.

No one would have fallen for the prank, in other words, if there were not an agreed-upon idea of how leaks appeared as a result of their illicit circulation. ILM regular Ned Raggett (2011) remembers Gillian’s prank, claiming it would not have been imaginable even a few years earlier:

Raggett’s claim underscores the mediating powers of infrastructure and technology to shape the authentic appearance of a leaked album. As is the case when buying a bootleg from an unknown vendor, authenticity is never guaranteed outside a sanctioned market transaction. Downloaded leaks are quite often dummy files uploaded anonymously and disseminated widely without context, while others are password protected, requiring downloaders to register at a website to unlock the dubious contents.

Several ILM members fell for Gillian’s well-executed prank, and posted their reactions on the messageboard. By and large they shared Grady’s affective register, and wanting to continue the joke for others, played along with the ruse, reframing their disappointment as vague puns. One member claimed, ‘have to be honest: makes me never want to give up.’ ILM regular Emily Sue Robinson added, ‘I swear, this band just rolls with every punch and puts out great record after great record.’ One member slipped up, asking, ‘so am I the only one who just got rickrolled?’, then quickly realized the error, and immediately followed that post with ‘I RUINED THE JOKE BAN ME.’ A subsequent poster, seeking to continue the joke, asked, ‘What is our next move?’, though the response indicated that the single-minded nature of the search process meant no adjustment was necessary: ‘im [sic] sure many people wont read the whole thread before (downloading)’ (‘Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion’).

It was true. Though Gillian initially posted the link to fool his ILM friends, the public post was quickly indexed by Google’s search engine, temporarily ranking ILM’s Merriweather thread (and Gillian’s post) among the top results for ‘Animal Collective leak’. His performance was publicized by Google’s search algorithm to a wider, indistinct audience who were most certainly not in on the joke. For many ILM members, this only made the joke funnier. Robinson, a friend of Gillian’s, extended the prank to her own blog, linking to the fake leak on Sendspace and writing a post (Robinson, 2008) that mirrored his enthusiasm. Her rationale was similar to his: she is not so much against the idea of downloading leaks, but blanches at the unseemly anticipation fans have for them. ‘That thread in particular encapsulates how annoying it is when there’s lots of anticipation for an album,’ she explained in an interview. ‘It gets really over the top, so much discussion about an album that hasn’t come out yet. … And they’re a band I don’t really care about, so it’s easier for me to make fun of that, I guess’ (Robinson, 2011).

It would not take long for Robinson to learn just how emotionally invested Animal Collective fans had become by that point. The day following the post, she noticed that traffic to her tiny blog had dramatically spiked – 12,000 hits overnight – and that the post had attracted hundreds of comments, which were waiting for her moderation. ‘I deleted the ones that were saying “don’t download this,” because I wanted people to keep downloading it, because I thought it was funny,’ she remembered. Then the emails started coming, fast and furious. ‘One outraged fan sends an epic indictment calling down a plague of frogs on my dwelling, and another expresses a desire to see my entire family in receipt of cancerous tumors on Christmas Day as a result of my rickrolling escapades,’ she wrote in a subsequent post (Robinson, 2009). It’s worth noting that Robinson had also received a takedown notice for the Rickroll from none other than Web Sheriff.

A few emailers’ names were attached to the notes they sent to Emily. One of the nastiest emails happened to come from Michael Chornomaz, an active Collected Animals member. After being fooled by the fake leak, Chornomaz sent Robinson an email with the innocent-seeming subject line ‘I have a question about your blog!’ Upon opening the message, Robinson was greeted with the decidedly not innocent single sentence, ‘hey, you’re a fucking asshole!’ After her initial shock wore off, Robinson took a screen capture of his email and uploaded it to the Merriweather ILM thread. Board members took pleasure in having an actual person to stand in for the nameless Googlers they were playfully defining themselves against. Through a quick Google search for Chornomaz’s unique surname, one member found and posted a link to his Last.fm page. Another discovered and posted a photo of him singing karaoke.

Robinson added the email screencap to her follow-up blog post as well. She typed Chornomaz’s name into the text of the post, thus ensuring that Google would index it, as a bit of payback for his impulsive rudeness. Google’s search algorithm’s unparalleled facility to index and rank text-based web content can be a cruel publicist, a fact that Chornomaz learned the hard way. ‘If you Google my name, if you’re my future employer, you’ll see that email, because I’m an idiot and I sent it from my Gmail, which gives you my full name,’ he admitted. ‘It’s okay, I live with it. My name is just so unique’ (Chornomaz, 2011: interview). That next February, a contrite Chornomaz sent Robinson an apology email, asking her to remove his name. Robinson accepted his apology, but declined to remove his name from the post. She did append an explanation to it, however: ‘He seems like a nice kid who somehow got mixed up in a rabid Animal Collective frenzy’ (Robinson, 2009).

Chornomaz (2011: interview) refers to himself as a ‘pretty intense’ Animal Collective fan, and agrees with Robinson’s assessment of his action, framing his email as the out-of-character behavioral lapse of a single-minded fan whose enthusiasm had left him wide open to being fooled. ‘It was like sitting around in the wintertime, it’s an obsessive thing, you think something’s gonna be there, because … these other album(s) … leaked like months in advance,’ he explained.

This explanation underscores a worldview developed out of immersion within a community of shared practice, the members of which have developed particular expectations for how a pre-release leak should appear.

Chornomaz’s slip-up was also facilitated by Google bringing his means-to-an-end affective practices into contact with ILM’s community of music fans, many of whom resented such unbridled eagerness. Whereas the ‘Brother Sport’ leak underscored the transfigurations a piece of music undergoes between commercial categories of piracy and promotion, the ILM prank transfigured the recording into a commentary on certain Animal Collective fans’ lack of affective propriety. While the DMCA permits Web Sheriff and Domino to control the circulation of copyrighted music by branding transgressors with the ‘pirate’ label, ILM’s fake leak operates on the far fringes of legal authority, where members of communities delineate and enforce their own sets of rules about proper behavior. Though separated by centuries, the point of the ILM hoax is reminiscent of the ‘courtesies’ that Adrian Johns (2009) describes arising to informally govern circulation in the early book trade. ‘Although they had little, if any, legal weight, there is ample evidence that they were respected by printers and booksellers and seen as a basis for harmony in their community,’ he explains (Johns, 2009: 12). Popular music’s current historical moment is an equally unsettled one, in which cultures of circulation have the power to shape, and to a degree, enforce their own rules. Fans have accepted the existence of pre-release leaks as a part of music culture to such an extent that a prank can be pulled exploiting both the appearances they manifest, and the lack of affective propriety among those fans trying to find them.

Conclusion

The events that transpired during the 3-month promotional period for Merriweather Post Pavilion create a space to investigate the intersections of affect, law and promotion in music’s nascent digital age. In the nearly 15 years since the first pre-release leaks of Van Halen, Metallica, Madonna, and Eric Clapton recordings made their way online (Sterne, 2012: 206), these transfigurations have become a predictable component of music promotion schedules, from million-selling superstars down to indie artists hoping to move 8000 copies of an album. While artists and labels have tried countless measures to stop them – legal threats, technological fixes, and attempts at cooperation with (and co-optation of) fans – leaks have proven as powerful and resilient as the commercial demand that spawns them and the constantly mutating online infrastructures that give them shape. For online fans, particularly those who gather on messageboards, leaks have added a new and exciting dimension to pre-release music hype, as well as an ethical component to their anticipation. As I have demonstrated, pre-release album leaks are not simply a black-and-white matter of piracy, in the sense of the word describing the unruly, unauthorized circulation of copyrighted works. ‘The metaphorical extensions of piracy mislead,’ Sterne cautions. ‘File sharing is intensely governed, not lawless’ (Sterne, 2012: 223). Indeed, when Animal Collective’s most devoted fans raced to acquire a digital copy of the freshly announced Merriweather album as soon as possible, their efforts were structured at every turn – by technologies, infrastructures, law, community norms, and the expectations they had developed and modified through practice.

Yet while the new promotional culture has developed certain recognizable contours, it is still consistently mutating, due to the unpredictable transfigurations that take hold as digital music circulates via the emergent drives of fan affect. The technological form of mp3 files allows recordings to escape established distribution networks and circulate in ways that performatively instantiate new interpretive communities with unique rituals of anticipation, listening, and evaluation. These recordings are temporally and technologically transfigured from their intended function as privately circulated promotional objects to something more closely resembling market-distributed possessions such as CDs. These technological and temporal transfigurations happen constantly and publicly, calling into question music’s commercial categories by blending promotion and piracy, and via the ever-present specter of fake leaks, highlighting basic uncertainties about the authentic shape of the digital music object. The Merriweather drama emphasizes that piracy remains an emergent category of commercial exchange owing to the performative dimension of circulation practices within specific historical, technological, and cultural contexts.