WHAT A TANGLED WEB:
THE LEAK-SNEAK GAMBIT

When “Too Drunk…,” a track from the upcoming album from Atlantic Records act Buckcherry leaked onto the Internet a few weeks ago, the L.A. band immediately issued a complaint in a blog on their MySpace page. The July 3 posting read in part, "We hate it when this shit happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first." The entry was accompanied by a link to an official download of the song, whose unexpurgated title is, of course, “Too Drunk to Fuck.”

Then, on July 22, Atlantic sent out a press release repeating the band’s complaint. These moves, of course, only served to increase awareness of the track’s P2P availability. Soon thereafter, the band released a music video for “Too Drunk…,” a number of stations around the U.S. began playing it and it entered various Rock charts.

The story took on an intriguing new wrinkle when Tenth Street Entertainment’s John Klemme, the band’s own manager, was outed as the source for the leak by the blog TorrentFreak.com. This morning, the story broke nationally in the Wall Street Journal. Oops.

A person close to a file-sharing site unaffiliated with TorrentFreak provided WSJ reporters Ethan Smith and Sarah McBride independent information that appears to support the TorrentFreak claim. This person confirmed the Internet protocol address of the computer that first sent "Too Drunk. . ." to filesharing networks in early July. Emails Klemme sent to the TorrentFreak blog originated at the same IP address, which in the email's routing information carries the additional identifier "joshlaptop."

Klemme didn't respond to calls or email messages requesting comment, while an Atlantic spokeswoman declined to comment. Tenth Street’s Jill Siegel said the company was investigating the source of the leak. "We take this very seriously," she told the reporters.

"I'm not sure that their credibility will really suffer," said Big Champagne’s Eric Garland in the WSJ story. "The audience is so savvy now" that it expects to be marketed to in unacknowledged ways.