A TORRENT OF
PABLO PIRACY

While Kanye West has tweeted that new album The Life of Pablo will “never be on sale” and will only be available to stream on Tidal, quite a few folks have been downloading the album—on assorted pirate sites. The record has been widely available on torrent sites and by some estimates had been downloaded more than 500k times in its first 24 hours.

While aggressive efforts have been made to pull the album from these illicit sources, history teaches that trying to keep a record (especially an anticipated one) off illegal download sites is typically a big game of whack-a-mole. The graphic below, snapped recently following a big takedown, shows 13k people sharing the album at once.

Will Team Kanye change direction on making Pablo accessible, given what’s being lost to piracy? What can rights holder UMG do to stop the bleeding?