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I really loved the new Boards of Canada release that I downloaded before the release date, even after I found out it was a fake. The story goes like this: devious downloader (me) downloads archive of new BoC entitled “The Campfire Headphase.” All the songs are there, and it sounds like something BoC would put out, so I assume it’s legit. Usually when something is fake it is so obviously fake, like the Time Bandits movie that turned out to be a porno, or the Queens of the Stone Age album that consists of looped choruses or verses of every song, but not both (pretty ingenious). My only suspicion at this point is that there were supposed to be guitars on this release, and I didn’t hear any. However, I chalked it all up to BoC’s incredible subliminality (yes, I just made that word up): the guitars simply weren’t recognizable as guitars, they were so transformed by their magically psychedelic editing process. So I listened to the album and began to let it soak in, and really started to dig it. It didn’t break any new ground, and I wasn’t sure it was even as good as Geogaddi, but I was digging it.

Finally, yesterday, I made it to the store to purchase the CD (yes, I purchase most of the music I actually like), popped it in the CD player and WHAT?!?!? Not what I had been listening to. At all. Remotely. I had been duped. I quickly learned that there were a lot of fakes going around before Campfire Headphase was released. I got fooled like that guy did. And I am also curious as to who authored the pretty good BoC fake. Or if it wasn’t perhaps BoC themselves. I wonder, could it have been an illegal file sharing network flood, like Madonna’s infamous “What the f— do you think you’re doing?”, only just a slightly inferior version by Boards of Canada themselves? Or perhaps it was an fake album of outtakes, or a file-sharing only version of the release, intended to complement the real one? Probably neither of these options is true, but the latter makes a lot of sense to me, in the post-consumer word of the music business. With your album release you simultaneously release a version of it for the P2P networks. A different version. It would drum up publicity for yourself, obscure the new release in a flood of fakes, drum up endless blogger conspiracy theories (doh!), and offer fans two for the price of one. But wait, didn’t Fiona Apple do that? Not quite, but she certainly took advantage of the fact that p2p networks are here to stay, in a brilliant way. She created fake drama about herself.

So I guess there’s one more reason to purchase your music legally, whether it’s in person, or over the interweb. The problem I have with the online music is the DRM and the compression. Sure it’s cheaper, but it’s not only the artwork you are missing out on. Criminal even gave me a few free BoC stickers and a poster, making it worth the inflated retail price of $15.