Here is a salutary warning about trying to be first by breaking the rules. Sometimes it can backfire.

Kylie Minougue’s new song ‘Slow’ was released this week. It was exclusive to industry music distributor MusicPoint, and was embargoed until 5.10pm when they put it on the site for all users to access at the same time.

Several stations, trying to beat their rivals to air with the new release, went elsewhere to try and source the song.

A radioinfo informant tells us: “There was a distorted version of what was believed to be the new song on Kazaa (no one had heard it yet so we weren’t sure).

Our rival station played it and took talkback comments on it claiming ‘a world exclusive of Kylie’s new song, just to get the jump on us.

The listeners hated it, and they had callers on air bagging it. When it came through on MusicPoint, we downloaded it, and to our delight it
was a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT song!!!

Our rivals had their exclusive with the wrong song – serves them right!”

radioinfo knows of at least 5 stations that fell into this trap. We have withheld names to protect the guilty from further embarrassment – their competitors are laughing hard enough already.