Waxy.org
Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a journalist/programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I'm the CTO of Kickstarter, created Upcoming.org, and some other stuff too.

Contact Me: log@waxy.org or waxpancake on AIM

Madonna's P2P Bombing

Posted Apr 14, 2003

People who try to download tracks off of the new Madonna album from peer-to-peer networks will likely get an MP3 full of silence, prefixed by this short personal message from Madonna (150Kb MP3). More information from Dotmusic. Thanks to Tpoh.org for the file.

Update: Using the MP3 I posted, several people have created remixes that use the Madonna sample heavily.

15 Comments (Add Yours)

Apr 14, 2003
2:31 PM  
Adam wrote:

Arg... I'm quite tired of Madonna... she is successful only because of those people who work on her album and the complex image she maintains. Like this.


Apr 14, 2003
6:31 PM  
triticale wrote:

The short personal message is great; I'll convert it to a .wav and make it the new error response on my system. I could care less about her music anyway. Wouldn't have bought it even if it were convenient to check it out as an MP3 first.


Apr 15, 2003
5:39 AM  
ABliss wrote:

As I read this entry I just finished downloading the new Madonna track and wondered if she or I was ripped off. It was her. Copyright seems silly to me.


Apr 15, 2003
5:51 AM  
Konstantinos wrote:

Also covered at Zeropaid.com.


Apr 15, 2003
12:29 PM  
Greg wrote:

Whatever you think of the copyright issue, you gotta give her credit for fighting back creatively.


Apr 17, 2003
9:41 AM  
R. Moose wrote:

[from my post @ BlogCritics]

Another problem with MadDonna's overdub, is that what was a legitimate stream @ MTV's The Leak had the overdub as well.

Hey MadDonna, What the fuck do I think I was doing? Listening to your new album as I was thinking of buying it...until you decided that I was doing something wrong! After the third track of being asked what I was doing, I stopped listening and decided I didn't need to purchase the album from someone that was insulting me!

BTW, MTV The Leak info was mailed to everyone that BOUGHT the American Life single MP3. So it wasn't like WB didn't know what was going on.


Apr 17, 2003
3:28 PM  
Anarchie wrote:

I will go out of my way not to buy this album now.


Apr 17, 2003
6:12 PM  
stacy wrote:

hmm.. i love madonna, i would eat her diarrehea with a spoon and enjoy every last chucky, runny bit.


Apr 20, 2003
6:03 PM  
Lee Azzarello wrote:

well, the first hit I downloaded off Gnutella not only has the song but it's a nice 192kbps rip! I wonder if madonna personally uploaded the mass of silent versions. She seems quite concerned about the virus of home taping...errr, digital piracy, or...mmm, what's it called these days?


Apr 23, 2003
12:01 AM  
ding wrote:

I just wasted half my day hunting Kazaa for a version of this "short personal message" and only managed to clutter my hard drive with legitimate Madonna mp3s. Was very disturbing. Then I found this web site : )


May 5, 2003
12:17 AM  
Mike wrote:

Wow, I bet she thought this was real clever. I found the "fake mp3 trick" mildly amusing the first time I saw it used, and a lot so the next 50 or so times. Simple fake tracks would have done as well as the rest of the record industry's futile attempt at stopping piracy but that wouldn't be pretentious and attention grabbing like everything else this woman ever does.


May 8, 2003
4:17 PM  
tyrone wrote:

Anybody who complains about getting a madonna mp3 full of silence, has a bigger problem, THEY LIKE MADONNA, ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Its ironic shes complaining about people ripping off her music, when all she does is rip off other peoples talent and puts her name on it.


May 31, 2003
2:08 PM  
Ricardo wrote:

Thanks for the Madonna "What the ..." mp3. I just spent a long time downloading and only could get the legal copies. Unlike many others who have left messages, I find Madonna incredibly talented.


Jun 11, 2006
6:20 AM  
Just Another Madman wrote:

Hey, great! I wanted this sample really bad,
nice of you to host it here. I suppose it
is legal to use, as the artist herself put
it into the public domain?


Mar 20, 2007
6:51 PM  
Ryso wrote:

I hate madonna. I am gonna write about this in the essay i am doing for internet law, and how much she sucks.


 

Leave a comment





Waxy Links
Ads via The Deck
November 20, 2009
Regretsy gets a book deal — the anonymous author turned out to be April Winchell, collector of audio oddities
Google Chrome OS Demo — a world without a local filesystem and apps; also, the Chrome UI concept video (via)
Patrick Moberg's Internet Vices — funny, Tumblr feels more like beer than wine to me
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's "Heaven Can Wait" — Keith Schofield's surreal video and insane treatment were inspired by FFFFOUND and Reddit, but maybe too explicitly (via)
November 19, 2009
YouTube adds machine-translated automatic captions — starting with some partner channels, but auto-timing is available to everyone today
Microsoft tries to patent Edward Tufte's sparklines — they were recently added to Excel
Leonard Lin's Retweet Avatars for Greasemonkey — a subtle change, but a big improvement
Web-ops god John Allspaw leaves Flickr to join Etsy — he's the last of the original Ludicorp team to go (via)
November 18, 2009
Laptop Steering Wheel Desk — don't miss the product photos
Interview with Ralph Eggleston, Pixar's production designer on WALL-E — from last February, but new to me; I didn't know the Axiom had three passenger classes
NSFW: Animated pixel-art video for Flair's "Trucker's Delight" — warning: very offensive and sexist, but the attention to 16-bit detail by director Jérémie Perin is incredible
NY Observer on Anil Dash's new government 2.0 incubator project — Expert Labs debuted at Web 2.0 today, funded with a $500k grant from the MacArthur Foundation
November 17, 2009
Google's Dan Morrill explains how the Droid autofocus breaks every 24.5 days — this gets second-place for quirkiest Android bug (via)
Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter on Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns — his style of comedy usually makes me uncomfortable, but this made me laugh
The Pirate Bay shuts down their tracker for good — they're switching to DHT instead
November 16, 2009
How Darren at Link Machine Go found Belle de Jour's identity five years ago — Brooke was part of the early UK blog scene
ICU64, real-time visualization of Commodore 64 memory — the developer also posted videos of Paradroid and Boulder Dash (via)
Russell Davies on pretending and "barely games" — his SAP prototype looks like great ambient fun (via)
NYT Magazine on the indie gaming movement — nothing new here, but good overview with a wonderful closing anecdote from Cactus
Tim O'Reilly on the pending War for the Web — "more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform"
November 14, 2009
Jason Scott rounds up Geocities' top 10 most popular MIDI files — along with a torrent with 51,000 MIDIs rescued by Archive Team
Matt Haughey on the discovery of his brain tumor, treatment, and the Internet's response — there were about 1,000 #mathowielove tweets in 24 hours
Belle de Jour reveals herself after six year of anonymity — only six people in the world knew, she only told her parents yesterday (via)
Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd — great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from (via)
November 13, 2009
Rogue Amoeba stops iPhone app development after App Store idiocy — I'm with Marco, the only fix is allowing external apps, but it's unlikely (via)
Numb3rs on IRC — "Luckily, I speak l33t."
Prank War 8: The Skydiving Prank — hard to say if life-threatening situations are funnier than public humiliation
301 Works, Internet Archive works to preserve URL shortener data — the shorteners will provide regular backups and hand over data on closure, though TinyURL's conspicuously missing
November 12, 2009
Quizipedia — simple game with trivia scraped from Wikipedia entries
Kill Screen, funding a new art magazine about videogames — sounds like the English analogue of Amusement I was hoping for

Andy Baio lives here. Some rights reserved, for your pleasure.