kibbe rocks the city

Monday I caught wind that the new A-Ha record had leaked and proceeded to tell my best friend (and world's biggest A-Ha fan) Ted, of the wonderfully tragic news (I still get a little bummed when something leaks).

Now today Norweigan papers are reporting that the leak did not come from a renegade journalist or someone from where the CDs are actually produced, BUT FROM UNIVERSAL NORWAY THEMSELVES!

From what I could make out from Google Translate + Ted's explaination of the article + my attempt to try this for myself (while not understanding Norweigan-English), Universal Norway asked you a simple question: "What's the name of A-Ha's last album?" and upon answering correctly it took you to a page where you could "preview" all the songs individually. But the kicker here is this: whoever set this promotion up did not go the extra mile to protect this precious album from being ripped off from the overly anxious + tech savvy superfans.

At first I thought they might have done this intentionally, but the article states A-Ha's manager Harald Wiik contacted the label on Monday to make sure the record wasn't going to leak and Universal Norway assured him that "you would have to be a super genius" in order to get the songs of their site.

Super genius!!?!??!?!

LOLZ.

My mother would fall over laughing if you told her that I was a super genius. If I'm a super genius than about 85% of the people I know are super genuises. Seriously.

I had to see this for myself. I got Ted to give me his zip code in Norway so I could try this out for myself. I managed to get to the download streaming page, which looks like this:

Even after discovering that it leaked, you think SOMEBODY over there would have stopped hosting MP3s and swapped it out for .FLVs or something!!!!

This is why I have no sympathy for record labels for the most part. You REALLY think it's not music hungry fans trying to hunt down music and then get so excited about it that they share it with everybody? Any idiot can install something like Downloader Helper and rip .MP3s that are being hosted on a site! Converting a .FLV to an MP3 typically makes it sound like crap on anything but headphones, so if you put that extra step in there #1- most people are too lazy to try to convert FLV to MP3 and #2- even if it does leak that way,it wouldn't go too far because the quality is garbage and most people would wait for a better leak to surface.

Also, don't EVEN get me started on the quality of all of these images and whatnot because they are atrocious. I know it's the Universal Norway site, but for band this huge in Norway, you could have gotten a MUCH better Flash developer for this. Just sayin'.