Update: It looks like these aren’t kosher – see our latest story based on a chat with digital distributor The Orchard.
Yesterday we reported on the mysterious appearance of five albums by The KLF on iTunes, Spotify and other digital services. Now they’ve disappeared just as mysteriously from iTunes.
The five albums – Chill Out; Space; The Lost Sounds of Mu, Vol. 1; The Lost Sounds of Mu Vol. 2; and The White Room: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack – were being sold for £7.99 each on iTunes, but are no longer available.
They must have been bootlegs if Apple has pulled them, right? Except according to Music Ally’s sources, Apple may not have been responsible for the takedown.
Add to this confusion the fact that all five albums are still available on Spotify, yet our contacts at that service still don’t seem to know whether they’re legitimate re-releases or dodgy bootlegs.
Either way, this is a big story. If The KLF have returned and made their back catalogue available again after deleting it in 1992 – and note that some of these albums were never ‘officially’ released anyway – that’s big news.
If they’re entirely unauthorised bootlegs, then the question of how someone managed to sneak them onto a range of digital services without triggering any red flags in the submission process is even more intriguing.
And, of course, there’s always the possibility that this is The KLF messing with all of our heads in some kind of 25th anniversary prank.
We’ll update this story over the course of today if any more developments ensue, but a good indicator will be the Spotify playlist we’ve made of the five albums which is embedded below. If it stops working, you’ll know they’ve been pulled from that service too.
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Nice headline. Who was it written by?
Headline changed to reflect my initial grammatical idiocy ;o)
Grammatical idiocy is AT LEAST as excusable as self-appointed grammar enforcement and grumpy snark. Have a nice weekend.