Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Collective anticipation

2012; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1354856512456787

1748-7382

Eric Harvey,

Digital Games and Media

Album leaks have become a taken-for-granted experience amongst artists, labels, and fans over the past decade. The cultural impact of leaks is obscured through a simple definition of piracy, however. Recordings encoded as mp3 files can escape established distribution networks and circulate in ways that performatively instantiate new interpretive communities with unique practices of anticipation, access, and evaluation. Using two incidents from the weeks leading up to the release of Animal Collective’s highly anticipated 2009 release Merriweather Post Pavilion, I contend that the practices and media technologies governing leaks transfigure the form and function of recordings, raising important questions about music promotion and fandom. In the first incident, a leaked song ripped from a podcast and endorsed on another artist’s blog triggers the involvement of a web security firm, blurring distinctions between promotion and piracy. In the second incident, members of a music messageboard create a fake leak to fool eager Animal Collective fans, exploiting the modular affordances of the mp3 to enforce their own rules of affective propriety for enthusiastic leak-seekers.