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Buckcherry Leak Track, Complain and Reap Rewards
8/7/2008 By Brock Thiessen
As bands struggle to generate buzz in an over-saturated marketplace, some are getting pretty desperate for attention, and it seems Buckcherry are one of them. As a recent Wall Street Journal article revealed, the cock-rockin’ L.A. band may have been reduced to leaking their own song on the internet in an attempt to catch the public’s eye — an alleged publicity stunt that so far seems to have paid off for the group.
A few weeks ago, a track called "Too Drunk..." from Buckcherry’s forthcoming album Black Butterfly “leaked,” leading the group to lash out against music piracy in a July 3 MySpace posting, saying "we hate it when this shit happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first."
The band’s label, Warner Music Group Corp.'s Atlantic Records, voiced similar complaints shortly thereafter in a press release, and provided a link on the band’s MySpace allowing fans to download the track and soon posted a music video for the song online. Many radio stations in the U.S. quickly picked up on the story and began putting "Too Drunk..." into heavy rotation. Within weeks the song had secured itself a spot on Billboard’s Top 40 singles chart.
Yet some players in the file-sharing community sensed something was amiss, leading Ernesto Van Der Sar, the head editor of the website TorrentFreak.com, to investigate. What he discovered, according to the Wall Street Journal, was that the song was allegedly leaked by a computer with an IP address linked to the band’s own manager, Josh Klemme.
Another source not associated with TorrentFreak backed up the claim by Van Der Sar, whose site traced the IP address back to Klemme through email correspondence with the Buckcherry manager. When TorrentFreak brought up the matter in an email to Klemme, he replied, asking to discuss things over the phone. The computer that sent the email had the same IP address as the song’s uploader and from a computer called "joshlaptop," the newspaper reported. That phone conversation never took place.
Klemme refused to comment to the Wall Street Journal, as did Atlantic Records. However, a spokesperson for Buckcherry's management company, Tenth Street Entertainment, said, “We take this very seriously.”
As of yet, it’s unclear whether the band will experience a backlash over the apparent ruse, but it does make you think about how many of these leaks are really all that illegal.
Buckcherry - “Too Drunk”
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