So in case you have been living under a rock for the last week, MSTRKRFT’s upcoming album Fist of God was leaked more than a month before its scheduled release.

• Yes, I’ve listened to it
• Yes, it’s awesome
• No, we wont be posting any tracks from it, at least for a little while

I honestly feel really bad for Jesse – we’ve had previous talks with him, and though he told us then that having his music on the internet doesn’t bother him, I can tell that this really disappointed him.  It’s my understanding that he gave out his album to a pretty tight inner circle, and it seems that someone has broken his trust.  To MSTRKRFT and Dim Mak: we’re thinking of you, and we hope this doesn’t get you guys too down.  You guys are our heroes.

As for the track Monarch posted a few days ago, that was a mistake, and I’m sorry.  He tells me that the quality of the track lead him to believe that it was a pre-release; the leaks him and I find are always 320, and this was a 128.  Dim Mak is by far the best label in genre, and we will always support everything they do.

This incident has got me thinking long and hard about the “new model” of music popularization, and sadly, I’ve come to few practical conclusions.  It seems to me that if bloggers worked together to support artists that things like this might not happen.  Sadly, the lack of centralization in the blogosphere makes leaks like this inevitable, and from an economic standpoint there is no way that is apparent to me to incentivize ethical practices.  Certainly, it is the indiscriminate aggregator (hypemachine, elbows) that, at once, allows for freedom of entry for the indie artist in to the music scene, and meanwhile creates the Hobbesian state of nature within mp3 blog culture, inspiring bloggers to post anything and everything they think will get them traffic.