Music Ally

Figures shared with Music Ally by tracking firm BigChampagne reveal that more than 445,000 people illegally downloaded U2’s No Line On The Horizon album in the two-week period between 18th February and 3rd March from BitTorrent.

The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.

It’s not great for U2, although they’re by no means the only band to suffer from a high-profile pre-release leak in this way. Would all those 445,000 people have bought the album if they didn’t have BitTorrent clients? Nobody knows for sure.

“They’re probably losing out, but to find out how much, you’d have to get into the head of every music fan and assess whether they would have bought the album if they hadn’t gotten it for free,” says BigChampagne’s Eric Garland. “It’s a philosophical debate – there’s no resolution.”

This chart was originally published as part of a longer feature in the Music Ally Report, a fortnightly publication analysing digital music trends and strategies. For a free trial subscription, click here.

As grumpy Brits, we were even more grumpy earlier this week when we found out that Amazon’s US MP3 Store was selling the new U2 album – No Line On The Horizon – for $3.99. They certainly weren’t flogging it that cheap on this side of the Atlantic.

However, supermarket Tesco has come to the rescue, with a week-long deal selling the MP3 version of the album for £3.97. It’s another sign of the digital music price war that’s threatening to erupt here, with retailers taking the hit in order to pick up market share.

Will it be just short-term gains, though? Even if not, U2 fans are the winners. At least, those who didn’t grab the album off BitTorrent when it leaked last week…

It’s been an eventful week for U2 news, much of it stemming from the leak last week of the band’s new album on BitTorrent.

Fingers are now being pointed at their own label, Universal Music Australia, which reportedly made the album available to buy on Aussie digital store Getmusic last week by accident.

Billboard says several bloggers have posted screengrabs showing they bought the album, and the fact that it quickly appeared on P2P networks indicates that this was the source of the leak.

But the real controversy around the album leak came on Friday with a claim on tech blog TechCrunch that Last.fm and its parent company CBS had handed over user data to the RIAA, so the latter could identify users who’d been playing the leaked U2 album.

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U2’s new album No Line On The Horizon has leaked onto P2P networks a week before its release, with hundreds of thousands of copies reportedly available for download.

This is despite the stringent security measures taken by the band’s label and management – review copies weren’t sent to journalists, who were instead invited to listening parties where any recording devices (including mobile phones) were banned.

Still, at least this time it wasn’t Bono’s fault – last summer, four unfinished tracks from the album leaked after a passer-by recorded them booming out of the frontman’s holiday villa.