Updated: includes article from ZDNet
Article from NY Times (registration required):
For the last three weekends not a night has gone by without at least a few cars cruising down Los Angeles's main drag, Sunset Strip, blasting "The Eminem Show." This album, the latest from the fast-rhyming, ire-raising rapper Eminem, briefly became the equivalent of bass-enhanced car stereos and custom rims: a showboating way to call attention to a car. This is because these drivers were blasting early pirated copies of the album, which was scheduled to be released next week.
So many copies of the album have been taken off the Internet and sold as bootlegs that Eminem's label, Interscope/Universal, made the rare decision to release the album early. First, it was pushed up to today, then the album was put on sale Sunday, wreaking havoc with the marketing campaign. Despite these problems, it is expected to be one of the best-selling albums of the year.
An article from ZDNet points out a few interesting facts:
The company's database [Gracenote aka CDDB] examines CDs' tables of contents down to slices just one-seventy-fifth of a second long. Copies that look identical at that scale almost always come from the same master copy, the company says.
In the case of the Eminem CD, eight slightly different versions accounted for most of the traffic. That means there's likely "eight major guys doing most of the pressing of this," Hyman said.
The company did a little detective work to figure out where most of the traffic originated. About 86 percent of the CD listening came from inside the United States. Los Angeles was the top listening location, and New York was second, Hyman said. The company hasn't crunched the numbers enough to figure out whether each location had its own dominant version of the bootleg, he said.
...
Analysts caution, however, that the real result of the early piracy will be impossible to untangle, whether sales figures are high or low. The online versions and bootlegging could serve as a marketing vehicle, whetting fans' appetite for the real thing, noted P.J. McNealy, research director for GartnerG2, a division of the Gartner research firm. Or it may cut into sales.
"We've yet to see hard numbers on what the marketing effects of piracy are," McNealy noted. "This could be like "Attack of the Clones." People may have pirated that, but they still went out and saw it in the theater."
It should be interesting to watch Billboard's Album chart next week to see how Eminem's album sales fare.