Wizkid’s Second Song With Drake Leaks

Let’s face it: songs leaks are nothing new. Since music could be recorded on portable devices (cassette tapes and compact discs); it has always happened that certain songs or albums find their way to the fans ahead of completion or release. It has been made easier these days that all you need is cloud storage to store a digital file.

Typically record labels react badly to leaks and artistes do too. Expectedly they treat it as a case of theft. Who wouldn’t? After working hard on a project for months- pay songwriters, pay producers, invest a lot of time and resources on it- the (un)finished track somehow finds its way to the market or the internet where (if the artiste is lucky) it’s given out for free or its sold and the proceeds never get to the owners of the work. Either way, it is a lose-lose situation for the record label whose intellectual property gets leaked.

In spite of efforts to make sure this doesn’t happen, it does. But how does it happen?

A recording studio is hardly a serene work environment: at any given time, there are several individuals milling about- producers, sound engineers, studio rats, hangers-on around the artiste and so on-and it’s not strange that sometimes demos and tracks find their way into unwanted hands. For these people who are always in the studio, it’s not that hard to lay their sticky fingers on tracks in various stages of completion. That’s why most leaked songs are unfinished versions.

Never mind record labels’ outward shows of being in control; they are often actual bedlam with several factions loyal to separate bosses. Sometimes all it takes for a song owned by the label to leak is one disgruntled employee who has access to any errant hard drive to copy the files and shoot it out. Finito.

Inviting pressmen to listening sessions a strategy that is slowly picking up pace in this part of the world. This writer has been in a number of album listening sessions where fellow journalists are invited to listen to recordings of a forth coming album with a view to critique it. Most times, the critiques are positive (I mean, how can you give criticize an artiste’s work negatively when you’re drinking his champagne and eating his small chops?). Still this does not stop some unscrupulous elements from selling and distributing the advance copies they’ve been given at these sessions.

The biggest culprits perhaps, are artistes themselves who out of rebellion against their labels make their works available ahead of agreed time. Most times, they do it for free publicity in the event of a soon-to-be-released album. What better way is there to let your fans be excited about your new body of work than you give them snippets in the form of a leaked track?

Mostly it is with righteous indignation. How dare you profit off our intellectual property bla bla bla. Of course the label that has spent heavily on the production of the leaked work will feel several types of ways and will try their hardest to ensure (to some extent) that the music does not go farther than it needs to. However, by the time they get around to reaching major new sites (like ours), the thousands of smaller sites have distributed it to a thousand and one smartphones and mp3 files world over.

For artistes, they typically do not take it as seriously as the label does. After all, is it not their names fans are shouting on the streets and on Twitter conversations? For all you know, Wizkid might be in a loft somewhere, smiling quietly that for the second year in a row, the world has heard of his collabo with Drake.