I haven’t owned a CD player that wasn’t built into a computer in years, so the watermarked CD’s that often don’t work on CD-R players are a problem for me (and I suspect many other music writers). The net effect of those sort of watermarked promos is to bury them under the pile on my desk of crap I never go through and writing the feature/preview based on what’s available on the musicians’ Myspace/last.fm profiles or The Hype Machine.

Listening parties are a joke as well–how many albums have you had a fair impression of based on one or two initial listens?

The basic fact here is that there may be no way of stemming these leaks. I’d wager that many more leaks are coming from the production chain and the label end than writers and editors, and it’s really impossible to stop them from getting out there unless you completely lock down the masters and “leak” it yourself, a la Radiohead or Stars.