iTunes Accidentally Leaks New Bon Iver Album

When Bon Iver's hotly anticipated second album Bon Iver leaked earlier this week, it wasn't because a CD fell into the wrong hands or someone got hacked or any of the usual reasons records hit the internet ahead of their street date. In this case, the culprit was Apple's iTunes store, the world's leading digital music retailer.

Download: Bon Iver Expand Their Sound on 'Calgary'

Though iTunes has declined to comment on exactly what went down, it appears as though someone at the company accidentally put the entirety of Bon Iver's new album on sale a la carte when the disc's first single "Calgary" was made available for purchase on Tuesday. Apple fixed the error shortly after it occurred, but that didn't stop a number of customers from buying and leaking the full album well before its June 21st release. Within an hour, Bon Iver was all over torrents and other file sharing services.

Bon Iver's record label Jagjaguwar and frontman Justin Vernon's attorney both declined to comment.

Choose Rolling Stone's Cover: The Sheepdogs vs. Lelia Broussard. Vote Now!

This isn't the first time an error in the iTunes store has led to a record leaking to the internet. Back in 2009, the Norwegian iTunes store accidentally put Kelly Clarkson's album All I Ever Wanted on sale a month before its street date. Also, in 2008, the store did the same thing with the Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely.

RELATED:

Bon Iver's 'Bon Iver': A Track-By-Track Breakdown

Why Bon Iver Had to Relearn Everything He Know

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter