Record leaks happen. I remember being 14 or so and having gained access to some albums a couple months before the street date hit. Was there a gray area there? Of course. But, these were albums I had been waiting for in excess of two to three years and I wanted to hear them badly. If fans can hear the the music, they will. Back then, if a record leaked, nothing happened – for the most part. The album street date didn't change. Over at MTT, there's a really smart post on how an artist that Jesse Cannon manages turned a leak that could have turned out to be a catastrophe and managed to make it into a great success. The best part:

"I ended up spending two hours while I was out on a Friday night begging a 16 year old girl from Canada to not leak any more of the record (not the type of thing they tell you about when you go to music business school) after she posted a song on her Tumblr. At this point we realized the record would inevitably leak early." (Read on.)