There’s a chance that many of the albums you’ve illegally downloaded have been tampered with. Not pumped full of viruses or digital anthrax or anything, they’ve just been slightly altered sonically. Added to. Changed. This is the work of the Overdub Tampering Committee, who released their manifesto earlier this week.

We are a group of musicians who have downloaded newly leaked albums by popular artists, quickly recorded many subtle overdubs over the work, and then re-leaked it to the internet. We have done this for about three years now. We used all kinds of instruments with recording techniques that matched the audio quality of the album in question. We used a varied amount of re-leaking methods including but not limited to Soulseek, OiNK, The Pirate Bay, Limewire and zipped files hosted on sites like YouSendIt or Mediafire with links spread out on hundreds of message boards. Our turnaround time was usually very short so often our version of the artist’s album was online for download within hours of its original leak. If you illegally download music on the internet the chances that our work is in your collection is very, very likely! In fact, you might have a whole lot of us!

So what’s the point?

One of the things that’s always shocked us about people “illegally downloading” music is the blind faith that what they’ve downloaded is the actual finished product that the band has released (or is about to release). We download and we had this faith too. But one day, about 4 years ago, one of us downloaded a newly leaked album by a very popular band. Excitedly listening to it for the first time we noticed a very out of place death metal song in the middle of the album. The obvious genre change and the ability to check the track listing and run time for each song on a reliable website made it easy to sniff out that this leak had been tampered with. We discarded the leaked files and waited patiently for the actual release where upon we bought it in a store.

This got us thinking: what if this problem got more insidious, subtle, and widespread? What if there was a network of musicians who got a hold of albums right as they leaked, added subtle yet very much additional overdubs all over the album, and then re-leaked it to the internet?

We imagined a scenario where someone would get in a car with their friend, he would put on the new _____ album, and you would say, “Where’s all the piano parts?” to which the driver would say, “What piano parts? This album is all guitars and drums.” Finally, you would scratch your head and say, “Not my copy!”

It would be bewildering.

It would be irksome.

It would be annoying.

We set out to make that specific bewildering, annoyance a possibility.

I remember downloading a copy of Built to Spill’s You In Reverse with a “Who is Mike Jones?” sample every two minutes, but I doubt that was them. The best part about this whole debacle is that it may itself be a scam. Maybe they didn’t do anything, and just said they did. From a post yesterday on their blog:

…Jon Parales of the New York Times wrote us with this short, reasonable request: “A scintilla of evidence would be nice.”

We wrote back: “Jon, Thanks for your email. We won’t be providing any more evidence than what is presented in the manifesto. We know what we’ve done, we’ve had fun doing it, and now it’s in the public’s hands. We don’t believe the burden of proof lays on our shoulders. Part of our goal with the project was that no one would ever know for sure how many albums we worked on, which ones, or if they resided in your digital music collection. In this way we highlight certain aspects of living in present day U.S.A. Often times proof is nothing more than general public consensus.”

The members of TOTC claim that they are all musicians themselves in bands whose music they have seen distributed illegally online, and that their albums have been tampered with as well.

thanks Brother for the tip.