TorrentFreak

• enigmax
• January 23, 2012
• 12
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This is a guest post from the admin of HasItLeaked, a site dedicated to the discussion of leaked music.

The music industry has never been good at solving their problems. They seem to hate progress, at least when you look at how they dealt with MP3s, file sharing, DRM or piracy in general. Some believe they are now catching up with digital download stores and DRM-free music.

But in the wake of SOPA it’s clear that there’s still something which is bothersome to the record industry. And as always, the solution is to simply push the stop button on everything which has something to do with files.

One of the reason behind the music industry’s hunger to shut down these sites are album leaks. The music industry still uses official release dates like it was still 1970 and by pursuing this strategy they demonstrate a failure to understand their own market when it comes to release dates and promotion.

Hiring a ‘Web Sheriff’ and going around and telling music blogs to stop leaks, seemed like a solution they liked for a few years. But similar to the music torrent site OiNK, you shut down one and two more appear online.

And that’s one reason behind the success of so-called cyberlocker sites. Although album leaks and downloads never stopped, downloading became easier for people who found torrents a bit too complicated.

Then suddenly Google’s search engine became a way of searching for albums. Since that site is a bit more tricky for the entertainment industry to shut down, it made everything it linked to its target. Stupid things obviously came of this, SOPA is a great example.

Even considering the recent news about Megaupload, people will find ways to share, they always do. Album leaks aren’t going to go away. Private BitTorrent sites, blogs and the scene will continue to leak music.

But I wanted to create something completely legal, which isn’t private, only accessible by invitations or risked getting shut down.

So I created a user-generated news site, “Has it leaked?” It isn’t a download site but a place where people can openly talk about and alert others about news regarding their favorite artist album leak. And maybe, when the RIAA scratches their head trying to figure out a way to shut down a news site, they choose to do something creative and smarter on their own instead.