It's fair to say that Madonna hasn't exactly kept her recording sessions a secret. And it would be easy to say that if you're going to spend a year building up demand for a new album, you shouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere, does something to meet that demand.
But on the other hand, that's bollocks. Nicking an album and putting it online when it's not ready just isn't on. Clips and maybe one or two tracks is alright. A whole album is just absurd.
Anyway, here are some songs we all know to be amazing, which didn't sound quite so amazing to start with.
Lady Gaga — 'Bad Romance'
Backstreet Boys — 'I Want It That Way'
Girls Aloud — 'Something Kinda Ooooh!'
Pet Shop Boys — 'West End Girls'
Madonna — 'Deeper & Deeper'
Madonna — 'The Power Of Good-Bye'
Madonna — 'Hung Up'
Fleur East — 'Uptown Funk'
All those songs sound pretty good in their unfinished states, of course, but the finished versions were better. And if we'd heard all these versions before we heard the final ones, would we ever have fallen quite so deeply in love with the songs?
(The exception to that point is 'Bad Romance', which did leak ahead of the proper one, but that's the best song of the millennium and it would have been amazing even if your first listen had been Lady Gaga shouting it down a paper tube in a shopping centre.)