Is Beyonce’s “Album Leak” A Danger To Spotify, Apple Music?

Recently, two new albums with material by Beyonce” credited to the name Queen Carter” showed up on Spotify and Apple Music. Social media went crazy, assuming that Beyonce, the master of the surprise album release, had repeated her magic trick yet again.

But it was not a surprise. Not a Christmas gift to her fans. It was a lie. As it was uploaded by a different person and it also contained old songs and demos.

Unauthorized recordings online are something we are used to, of course, but are usually found on YouTube or on file-sharing networks. So the fact that two albums by a world class musician were available on Spotify and Apple” two giant online outlets long seen by the music industry as bulletproof against piracy” is strange. (It did follow the release this month of demo recordings by the R&B singer SZA, which, the head of her label said on Twitter, had been “stolen and leaked.)

Spotify especially who has an upload it yourself policy that has proven a good tool to bypass the control a reord label has on you, this leak is a possible risk for the company in maintaining its relationship with some of the top guns.

“This is a classic dilemma that all of these services are facing, said Panos A. Panay, the vice president for innovation and strategy at the Berklee College of Music. As you open up your platform, how do you ensure the accuracy and legitimacy of the content you are putting up there?

Representatives for Spotify, Apple and Beyonce refused to say a word.

Services like Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal receive most of the music they stream from a handful of distributors, many owned by the major record labels. But in recent years a vibrant independent sector has developed that lets anyone upload their music and have it legitimately distributed to all the major online services, usually for a small fee.

Those services generally require users to show that they have the necessary rights to post songs. But with millions of songs moving through the ecosystem, errors and misrepresentations are not far from taking place.

The two Queen Carter albums, Have Your Way and Back Up, Rewind, and the SZA songs, for example, were both apparently uploaded through Soundrop.