Word: skwerl
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...nine tracks Skwerl put on his site were pretty exciting (you have not fully rocked until you've heard Axl Rose give it to Hu Jintao: "Blame it on the Falun Gong!/ They've seen the end, and you can't hold on now!"). But they weren't as exciting as talking to Skwerl. Until our conversation, I didn't really understand how piracy worked. Unfortunately, before he could explain, I had to interrupt to get to the bottom of this "Skwerl" thing. After bottle-nursing an injured squirrel back to health in high school and taking...
...Skwerl, 27, is in a punk band and used to work for Universal Music. Now he works for a Web marketing company. "Among my friends, I'm the guy known for getting things no one can get," he says. "I'm just that rabid for information." Skwerls are the people who make the Internet useful. To everyone but record companies...
When blogs reported in April that Rose had finally delivered the album to his record company, Skwerl implied on his blog that he'd post the tracks if he got them. So someone who works for the record company sent them to Skwerl, and Skwerl threw them up on a player so people could listen but not download (though, of course, they found a way). The traffic crashed his server in 10 minutes. Within the hour, someone from Rose's camp called. "He was pretty cool. He seemed to be kind of like a warning-shot thing," says Skwerl...
...June 23, two FBI agents were waiting for Skwerl in his office lobby and then checked his computer, hoping to find his source. While that makes Skwerl a little uncomfortable and he feels a little sad that Rose, his favorite rock star, is probably angry with him, he still thinks he did the band a favor. Now people know that the album isn't just a myth, that it's coming soon and that people who've heard it are saying it's good. And other than some increased traffic on his blog, Skwerl didn't profit from his stunt...
...megafans aren't going to stop themselves. Record companies will have to learn that giving music previews away--just as Google gives away its searches--in exchange for ads, sponsorship and merchandise is the new business model. And if I wasn't sure of that before, I was when Skwerl told me that as we were speaking, a live version of one of the songs appeared in his inbox...