Jacob Smith
Opinions Editor
Waiting for the next album from your favorite musician or the sequel to a movie you love can be excruciating. Even when a release date is confirmed, some people can’t bear the intermission period. To solve this end-of-the-world problem, leak culture was born.
A “leak” refers to the releasing of information on a then-unreleased creative project. This is something that occurs across multiple mediums of content, such as music, television, film, gaming and anime spaces. Leaks can range from a low-quality snippet of a song to full-length scripts and entire albums. As nice as it is to experience these things early, the lasting effects of this behavior on the entertainment industry far outweigh the benefits.
Ever since the release of her first album in 2013, Ariana Grande has been a pop sensation. With seven studio albums, two EPs, and 57 singles under her belt, Grande has a very healthy music catalog for fans to enjoy. But despite her mainstream status, she has also fallen victim to leak culture.
In August 2023, a song titled “But just before I go, there’s something you should know” was uploaded to Spotify by user “Adriana Venti.” This release ended up being a demo of a previously vaulted song by Grande. Dubbed “Fantasize” by the Arianators, the song amassed 70,000 streams before Spotify took it down, alongside going viral on TikTok.
Grande commented on the situation under a now-deleted TikTok, explaining that she “wrote this for a comedy sketch about a girl group.” When she appeared on the “Zach Sang Show” in February 2024, she spoke about how this leak affected her.
“That wasn’t for me … I took the note and gave them Ariana’s version of that on the album, so some of those seedling ideas from that time actually made their way onto the album,” Grande said. “But they’re completely different now, although you’ve heard them because you stole them.”
Although Grande says this song was stolen from her, some people aren’t convinced. In the comment section of “Entertainment Tonight’s” coverage of the leak, many top comments accuse the pop singer’s staff of being the ones who leaked it.
“I love Ari, and I’m not saying she had a role in the leaking,” user @Jumbaride said. “I do find it interesting how these ‘leaks’ happen on the heels of promoting a new project; in this case, the ‘Wicked’ movie.”
The film industry has had its fair share of leaks, the worst being the reveal of entire scripts. This happened with “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” where an incredibly detailed plot breakdown of the film was posted to Reddit a week before being released in theaters. Disney never commented on this incident, however, the film’s director J.J. Abrams did provide a potential explanation as to how the plot could have leaked.
When he appeared on Good Morning America to promote the final chapter in the “Star Wars” saga, Abrams spoke about how a legitimate script was stolen. “One of our actors left it under their bed and it was found by someone who was cleaning their place,” Abrams said. “And it was given to someone else, who then went to sell it on eBay.” The item was eventually bought by someone at Disney before it could be sold to anyone else.
To me, these kinds of leaks are no better than spoiling the movie. If you had read the Star Wars leak, you had pretty much already seen the film. Spoilers are another issue the film industry has had trouble with and directors and studios have explicitly spoken out against.
Whether you’ve seen the movie or not, pretty much everyone knows that the Avengers lose at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War.” In the days following the film’s release, you couldn’t go anywhere on the internet without seeing some post referencing the “snap” or people “not feeling so good.”
This got so bad that before the release of the sequel, “Avengers: Endgame,” the directors Joe and Anthony Russo proposed a “spoilers grace period” that would last until the Monday after its release. This allowed people who wanted to see the movie but couldn’t on the day of release enough time to enjoy it without getting spoiled.
The film industry isn’t the only one dealing with spoilers, though, as the Anime community is the most recent space affected by leak culture. Jujutsu Kaisen is an anime and manga series about super-powered characters fighting against evil cursed spirits. Following the release of the anime adaptation in 2020, the series became incredibly popular, with many viewers deciding to pick up the manga from where the show had left off.
The series was published in Weekly Shonen Jump, a magazine released exclusively in Japan. This is where Viz Media, an American-based manga publisher, gets its content from. However, there is a couple of days delay between the original Japanese release and the English translation. Leakers naturally popped up to share the untranslated chapters to readers and explain what was happening.
Fans became so invested in these leaks that one account @Go_Jover was one of the most popular accounts on X. The data compiled by Similarweb revealed that this account had exceeded the website traffic of people like Mr Beast, Andrew Tate and Joe Biden. But for as popular as this account and other Jujutsu Kaisen leakers were, readers began to grow tired of having chapters be spoiled before they ever got the chance to read them.
As the manga was releasing its final chapters, another leaker @f9x00, aka Myth, talked about moving to leak a different manga series, Kagurabachi. Due to heavy criticism and pushback, they announced they would not leak the series on X.
“I’ll always do what the community thinks is right because I really am part of you guys, and I won’t force anything on anyone,” Myth said. This was met with comments of praise and relief, with one post captioned “WE ARE SAVED” receiving nearly 2,000 likes.
No matter how much artists and fans complain about leak culture, I think it’s here to stay. If there’s anything good to come out of situations like with Grande and Star Wars, it showed that there was a lack of security that has hopefully been corrected. As long as we start seeing more pushback against leakers, then this issue should eventually become less prominent.
