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.However, several Last.fm executives have since categorically denied that this is the case, while the RIAA has also chimed in to say it didn’t ask for or receive any such data.It might be untrue, but the story has undoubtedly caused problems for Last.fm, with some users instantly deleting their accounts and scrobbling history in outrage.The final piece to the U2 leak puzzle is the announcement by both MySpace and Spotify that they have exclusive streams of the new album this week. MySpace’s appears to be North America only, since it’s on the MySpace Music service (it’s not accessible from the UK, for example – we just checked).However, Spotify’s streaming exclusive IS available here in the UK and also in Spain. Such pre-release streaming deals are now common for big albums, so it’s doubtful that these were a specific response to the album leak.
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