A few days ago Kanye West released The Life of Pablo. The album subsequently ended up on various pirate sites where it was quickly downloaded by hundreds of thousands of fans.
A lot of media attention has focused on The Pirate Bay, where it is still listed as the most popular music download after two weeks, with thousands of people actively sharing the tracks.
Meanwhile, the news also reached Kanye West himself, who considered taking legal action against the notorious torrent site. While he would not be the first to try, a tweet posted a few hours ago made the whole situation a lot more ironic.
At first sight little appears wrong with the tweet, which comes with an image showing a YouTube video of Sufjan Stevens’ track “Death with Dignity.” However, taking a closer look at the other open tabs is quite revealing.
For example, the tab second to the left reads “”Pirate Bay Torrent Xfe..,” where the last part is likely a reference to Xfer Records.
The tab itself is not from The Pirate Bay website, which uses a different title structure, but comes from a site that uses the TPB brand. This release blog, which lists a pirated copy of Xfer Records synthesizer software Serum, seems to be a likely candidate.
This suspicion is supported by another open tab pointing towards a Music Radar article listing the best VST/AU plugins, where Serum comes out as one of the winners.
Finally, the “MediaDownloader” tab completes the pirate circle, as that would allow West to rip music from YouTube so it can be used together with the pirated software to create his next hit.
Kanye’s tweet is a painful mistake, and one that didn’t go unnoticed.
DJ Deadmau5, who co-founded Xfer Records, saw the tweet and called out Kanye as a dick. Not much later he showed a bit more sympathy for Kanye’s circumstances, calling for a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a legal copy of the software.
The Pirate Bay team, meanwhile, is quite amused by the whole episode and says it welcomes pirates from all different walks of life.
“If he runs into difficulty he should try the forum for technical help and support,” TPB staff member Spud17 informs TorrentFreak, noticing the shift from the earlier agressive stance.
“Makes me wonder just how skint he claims to be, perhaps he’s ‘slumming it’ to try and regain some credibility,” Spud17 adds.
Of course, there’s a slim chance that Kanye is pulling off an elaborate prank, which would be a good one. If so, he managed to plug The Pirate Bay in the process, so it’s unlikely that he will take credit for it anytime soon.
