An internet service that sends track listings and artist information to individual online CD players has uncovered new evidence that many people use bootleg music CDs before they are officially released.
A chart compiled each week from the Gracenote internet music database shows that Eminem鈥檚 new album, The Eminem Show, was the second most frequently played CD a week before its official release on 26 May.
鈥淚t鈥檚 pretty safe to say that it鈥檚 all CD-Rs that people have bought off the streets or burned from friends,鈥� Gracenote chief operating office David Hyman told internet news service 快猫短视频.com. 鈥淭his is the first time anything unreleased has shown up at number two.鈥�
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The information that Gracenote keeps is linked to a particular album by an identifying snippet of data that appears on the CD. Individual CD players then send the snippet via the internet and receive back information, such as the title of each track. The company also keeps a record of each request made to the database to tally up the most popular recent CD releases.
Tens of thousands of requests
Gracenote has not said exactly how many requests were received for The Eminem Show but the figure is reportedly in the 鈥渢ens of thousands鈥�. This compares with a total of about seven million requests each week.
Most CD players retain a copy of the information received from Gracenote鈥檚 database, so most requests are likely to have come from different people鈥檚 players.
The company鈥檚 latest figures were recorded for the week prior to Sunday 26 May. It is thought that a limited number of music shops may have released the album before Sunday.
Gracenote has reportedly said that the digital information forwarded to its database also indicates that all the bootleg copies of Eminem鈥檚 album were made from eight master copies.