The Eraser is the work of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and blippy Radiohead/Beck/Travis producer Nigel Godrich. Although the project was only announced a month or two ago, Radiohead's audience is such that it was quickly the talk of the internet. Thousands of blogs linked to the Stanley Donwood-illustrated website, speculation flourished, and all the rest.
Well, yesterday the album - due July 10 on XL - leaked. Watermarked copies were going out to some press and inevitably someone shared it. No word whether they were clever enough to strip the watermark or not. Perhaps a head will roll, perhaps not. (There's a Radiohead lyric right there.)
While presumably it was first passed around via IRC, for all intents and purposes the leak's first main appearance was at the messageboard of Radiohead fansite At Ease. A few years ago that was ground zero for the Hail to the Thief leak, as well. Within no time at all, the album had been posted at OiNK, probably the most popular BitTorrent tracker for music, and then when the kids realised XL's not a member of the RIAA, at Indietorrents. At that point there was no stopping dissemination. I've seen links to the album posted via SendSpace, via YouSendIt, via RapidShare. Suddenly, it was everywhere.
Case in point, ye olde mp3blogs. Like I said, Radiohead is pretty much the band for webgeeks - electronic, angsty, "intelligent", dystopian, catchy, mainstream-underground alt-rock. So mp3blogs were crawling all over each other for the chance to be first through the gate with some of these Eraser tracks. Due to the boom of mp3blog aggregators like Elbo.ws and the Hype Machine, blogs today attract a lot of traffic based on songs they've posted (rather than via blogroll or authors' reputation), and 'breaking' popular new music has become a common way to try to attract an audience. While some of the people who have posted Eraser tracks had good and interesting things to say about them, the majority are basically pulling a "CHECK IT OUT!!!111!1!!!!"
Anyway, mp3blog aggregators have the tendency of reducing the vast pool of bloggers into nothing more than a web-based download service. As of right now, Hype Machine indicates that you can download 8 of the 9 tracks on The Eraser by visiting an assortment of different mp3blogs:
1. The Eraser
2. Analyse
3. The Clock
4. Black Swan
5. Skip Divide
6. Atoms For Peace
9. Cymbal Rush
