In an act of betrayal worthy of a song by Taylor Swift herself, some dirty, dirty cheat went ahead and leaked her new album 1989 onto the internet overnight.
1989 is not due out until Monday, but it showed up Friday on file sharing service Zippyshare, with a file (allegedly) called “albumsgonnaleakleakleakleakleak.rar.”
The question currently on the internet’s mind is who the hell would do such a thing.
Katy Perry is a possible suspect, given the shady subtweets she has been throwing Swift’s way recently. It could also have been Harry Styles, as his way of getting revenge on Swift for penning so many damn songs about him.
At this point, though, the main culprit is the otherwise polite and friendly nation of Canada.
Earlier today, Vulture embarked on an outstanding piece of investigative journalism, in which they initially identified the source of the leak as France.
They noted that the original leak contained a number of unnamed tracks, which were instead labelled “piste” – “piste” apparently being French for “track”, and also, the emotion that Swift is likely feeling this morning.
Furthermore, when they uploaded the contraband album into iTunes, the French phrase “Album inconnu” appeared instead of the usual “Unknown album.”
When a Vulture reader pointed out that French is also spoken in Canada, all the pieces began to fit.
Canadian iTunes has already been responsible for one Swift-related snafu this year, when 8 seconds of static appeared on iTunes mistakenly labelled as ‘Track 3’ from 1989, and was purchased so many times that it went to number one in the charts.
Seems pretty conclusive, right? If the security of their shit has been compromised once, it’s totally not hard to imagine it happening a second time. You’d better watch your back, Canada, Taylor Swift and the might of her label are coming for you.
As for the bigger question of whether this leak will hurt sales of 1989, which is predicted to be the biggest album of the year, just consider the fact that Canadian Swift fans were literally willing to pay $1.29 for eight seconds of static with her name on it.
We think she’ll be just fine.
Photo: Bryan Steffy via Getty Images
