Well I'm personally not upset at you or anything, honestly. Y'know, one thing I want to make clear to everyone is that we DO really appreciate the interest people show towards us and our music, in any way. Yes it is flattering to know that people enjoy our music enough to download it and listen to it alot, even if they didn't pay for it. It's just that people have to understand that we cannont really advocate and justify downloading when it's done illegally and takes away potential profits that we can use towards making a better album, new t-shirts, music video, playing in your town, etc. We've been through all this before and I've spoken at great length about it. I think it's nice that someone downloaded some stuff of ours and liked us enough to go buy the cd. It's the reason why we have free tracks to download on our website, on myspace, on sampler cds, and so on. We gave away hundreds of free compilation cds when we toured in 2004, that we paid for out of our own pockets (special mention towards Mike Lagros our old bassist for really making that possible too, kudos to him). There've been plenty of times that we've sent free shirts or cds to fans through the mail over the years, just for showing that extra bit of support towards us. Anyone that knows really knows us, knows that we're not a greedy band. It's just that this is a tough business to keep afloat in, and as our overhead costs are soaring higher and higher as time goes by, people are willing to pay less and less for what we do. So, sorry, illegal downloading is just a touchy subject for us. Add to it that it adds confusion such as the whole mislabeled songs and screwed up song order, and it just irritates us that much more, haha.
To answer the query about how cds get leaked so early, yes it is most often due to someone uploading a promo copy of an album, usually someone at a magazine or website who received it early for reviewing purposes. That's why alot of promos now come edited in a way that the songs are interrupted by a repeating message or "tone", so that you can still get an idea and feel for the music, but it's not the 100% clear and perfect version you'd get if you bought it, so that people might be a bit more apt to purchasing it when it comes out even if they'd already downloaded the promo. But not all bands and labels use this edited promo process.
Ah, well, put it this way....I'm a huge Cameron Crowe fan. If I was able to get a dvd of his new movie a month before it came out, I'd probably be pretty tempted to check it out. But I would probably never tell him directly that I did it, because it just seems kinda impolite haha
