When a version of the Deerhunter album Microcastle—which celebrates its legitimate release tonight with a party at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta— was leaked by an anonymous source going by the self-referencing handle “microasshole” on the band’s unofficial message board in June of this year, Bradford Cox sent a statement to the forum’s administrators requesting that the link be removed, saying the band “really wanted the record to be a surprise and would be terribly disappointed if it leaked this early.” Although this statement was posted and the link was removed from the forum just three hours after originally posted, it had already been posted on last.fm blogs and BitTorrent clients; after three days the record received fifteen hundred downloads from one site alone. Months after the leak, Cox described it to us as another symptom of “this modern climate of high tech piratetry,” but also said “I can make records faster than people can leak them.” Just for fun, we traced Microcastle’s leak, step by step, in the oddly-shaped illustration above. See it enlarged here.
