Rebel Heart Label: Interscope US Release Date: 2015-03-10 UK Release Date: 2015-03-09'What the fuck do you think you're doing?' For a bunch of people who tried to illegally download Madonna's 2003 album American Life, this was the exact phrase they heard, spoken by the Queen of Pop herself, followed by minutes of silence. Some context: as a way to try and counteract file-sharing in the immediate aftermath of Napster's shutdown, Madonna and her team thought that by creating dummy files that mirrored the run times of the actual album tracks and uploading them to various P2P servers, Madge's stern warning would help curb any sales losses and force digital thieves to reconsider their actions. The plan ended up backfiring, with one irritated hacker and posting the MP3s to every song on the album, adding the message 'This is what the fuck I think I'm doing.' On 16 December 2014, Madonna received word that more than a dozen demos for her pending album Rebel Heart.
The Inside Story of How Madonna Turned Her 'Rebel Heart' Leak Into a Global Hit. To date, the six tracks have sold a combined 131,000 downloads, according to Nielsen Music, with preorders for Rebel Heart at a robust (considering the situation) 50,000 to 60,000, according to industry estimates.
With iTunes executives on vacation, there was little Madonna could do outside of decrying the leak as 'artistic rape' on Instagram, eventually holing up in studio and putting some finishing touches on a handful of songs while her manager Guy Oseary called in every favor to rush-release a short EP of album tracks that would come with every album pre-order. Astonishingly, the gambit worked, and Madonna topped iTunes charts around the world.The parallel between these two incidents is uncanny, and in the case of American Life, all that behind-the-scenes drama ultimately overshadowed Madonna's usual boundary-pushing narrative, her defiant attitude, controversial music video, and political grandstanding all working in tandem to relegate American Life as nothing more than a footnote in her legacy, many calling it the worst album of her career.