Kelly Clarkson’s new album was accidentally leaked to the internet recently. The culprit is the Norway division of iTunes, which reported that they had leaked All I Ever Wanted straight to the internet. This is big news because the official release date for Clarkson’s new album is set for March 10th, and her first single off of the album was just released. Leaking the entire All I Ever Wanted album is not only going to be bad press for the Norwegian iTunes, but it is probably going to be bad business in sales for Kelly Clarkson.
This was good news for Kelly Clarkson fans, because it seemed at first like it was just going to be a typical iTunes type release, where 30-second snippets become available for each song on the album. Those who were on the site at the time listening to the snippets were quick to realize that they could actually purchase and download the whole album right then and there, and the tracks began disseminating around the internet in a hurried fashion. Already the songs are showing up on P2P sites as well as message boards. Fans in The United States using the local iTunes weren’t quite as lucky to pull of this coup, but it will look bad for iTunes now.
This is a pretty big error for iTunes to be making, and one which the music business is not going to soon forget. This also isn’t the first time that an album of this popularity has been released by accident, and it is definitely going to hurt sales in the long-run if the downloaded tracks make it completely around the music world. In March of 2008, iTunes had a similar problem when they leaked an album from the Racounteurs, who saw their album Consolers of the Lonely leaked even after many precautions were taken to try and ensure that it didn’t happen.
All I Ever Wanted will be the fourth album from Kelly Clarkson, who broke through with Thankful, Breakaway, and My December in previous year. The first winner of American Idol, Clarkson has seen continued success with her music, and her latest single My Life Would Suck Without You is already burning up radio station airwaves around the country. Her new album is sure to still be a huge success both in the United States and overseas, but it is such a shame when a music distributor like iTunes can make such a vital mistake such as this one. In an industry already down in sales, it would seem that there would be more safeguards against mistakes like this one.
Sources: Rolling Stone and Wikipedia
