Were you waiting for the release of the new AC/DC album? Why?

Team Member - Bill Frost

Over the weekend, I saw a commerical for the forthcoming AC/DC album "Black Ice". The new album was released in Wal-Mart stores today. Whereas I don't claim to be a huge AC/DC fan, there are definitely songs that I enjoy listening to. "Thunderstruck" is by far my favorite. There are however thousands, probably millions, of fans that anxiously waited for October 20th to arrive. Too bad there were already over 400,000 AC/DC fans listening to a digitized version of "Black Ice".

Reportedly on October 7th, the album was leaked to the popular website BitTorrent and the downloading began. There had been a rumor that Sony had sent false information and fake downloads out to popular BitTorrent sites in an effort to frustrate pirates. There has been no conclusive evidence to this story and it appears the record label is the one frustrated by the "success" of the number of downloads.

Statistics from Mininova, a popular download site, showed four of the top five downloads to be by AC/DC. Although the band as refused to release their music through the Internet, others have been doing so and the results speak for themselves. While the sale of most recording artists music has been declining for the past five years, AC/DC has had remarkable success. Without the release of a new album, AC/DC's physical record sales reached 1.3 million in 2007 in the US alone. Now consider that nearly a third of those total sales were accounted for in just twelve days with the downloading of "Black Ice."

Read the story in it's entirity here.