Image Credit: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic.com

Some time between Saturday night and Sunday morning, the entirety of Drake’s Take Care, the followup to his breakout 2010 debut Thank Me Later, found its way onto the Internet.

As news of the leak spread, Twitter exploded with chatter about it, and while any artists get extremely rankled when their music gets out prior to the release date (and, of course, for free), Drake himself was pretty casual about it. “Listen, enjoy it, buy it if you like it…and take care until next time,” he tweeted late last night.

The idea of an album leaking isn’t really a story. After all, pretty much everything leaks, and the timeline for Take Care is about right (the release date is next Tuesday, November 15, which means the finished album probably got lifted somewhere along the lines of production).

Drake’s casual reaction is the right one. After all, if people hadn’t gone out of their way to leak his album, that probably means people weren’t interested in the first place. An album leak is something of a validation, and though it may also feel like a backhanded (and bad for business) compliment, it still tells the artist, “You are big enough to steal from.”

It will probably cost Drake a little bit in album sales, but research shows that for a guy in Drake’s position, leaks don’t have as negative an impact as you might think — the logic being that people who will download the leak were unlikely to purchase the album in the first place. Plus, considering Drake himself had unleashed no fewer than six of the tracks from Take Care himself (including “Crew Love,” which showed up on Saturday on a radio station in Toronto), there was already plenty of Drake music out there for people to take.

In reality, it’s a bigger story when albums don’t leak. READ FULL STORY »