It's not a new phenomenon, but it seems to be accelerating: Artists (and/or their record labels) are releasing albums sooner as a way of trying to combat rampant leaks and downloading. One of the latest to move up the official release date is Gnarls Barkley, whose latest album is called The Odd Couple. Although the band's record label hasn't confirmed that the move is due to piracy, most of the tracks from the album are already available on file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent. The album went on sale on iTunes on Tuesday.

The Raconteurs, meanwhile -- the side project of White Stripes' frontman Jack White -- are throwing in the towel on the whole release-date idea completely: the band recently announced on its MySpace blog that it is releasing its new album Consolers of the Lonely simultaneously in every conceivable format, including downloads. "We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding it's availability, reception or perception," the band said.

Leaking also forced Britney Spears to move up the debut of her album Blackout last year, after copies started circulating on the Internet well in advance. And Radiohead singer Thom Yorke said in an interview earlier this year that fears of a leak prompted the band to release its album In Rainbows as a "pay what you want" download, which garnered a ton of publicity for the British alternative group. "Every record that we've done for ages has been leaked -- why not leak the bloody thing yourself?" Yorke told New Music Express.

Other artists have held back their records in order to add new content after the tracks leaked Last year, Fall Out Boy offered fans a special live disc along with the recorded music CD after their album Infinity on High escaped into the wild. And others have surrendered to the power of the leak and tried to turn it to their advantage: rapper The Game admitted that he leaked his own album rather than have someone else do it, and compared the practice to crack dealers giving users a free sample of their product to increase future sales.

It's interesting to note that not all leaks result in lower sales of the final product, either. The Shins had their album Wincing the Night Away leak on the Internet last year, but the record still went on to sell over 100,000 copies in its first week, and wound up on the Billboard charts.