I just don't see this Warner 5 track sampler coming out. Honestly, I don't want it to leak. Others on this board will probably have better examples - but one parallel is the Expendable movie by Stallone. Industry watchers strongly believe that its sales got killed when the movie was leaked. I don't want to see that happen to duran. Regardless of how good Paper Gods is, Duran need things to go smoothly here without having to worry about leaks - especially if it's this new audience that JT mentioned that is in play here. I mean - most of us will buy the cd even if we have the leaked copy. If someone hears Pressure Off on the radio and wants to buy it and they are not a fan of Duran, they wont buy it if they can get the leaked version.
imho, this is buying into the industry b.s. that piracy kills all & everything.
The New York Times looked at the actual downloads of E3 & pretended that every single one was a lost ticket sale in N America (& effectively that there was no piracy of the original or E2) - & the film was still way down on the previous instalments of the series. (www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/movies/the-expendables-3-fumbles-its-mission.html?_r=0)
Now, quite obviously, a download does not equate to a lost ticket sale - as many people either wouldn't have paid to see the thing anyway or, instead, as most people's disposable income is limited, they will have bought something else instead within the money that they can afford to allocate towards their entertainment budget.
[NB There's also a separate concept of cultural poverty - where people on very low incomes have no option but to pirate in order to both enrich their lives & play an active part within the culture of society...
(& this is what we all did as kids when money was much tighter for most of us - taping things off friends & the radio & whatnot)
...& this was part of the rationale for public libraries, which, at the time, the 'industry figures' stated was going to spell the death knell for books when they were being introduced in the mid-1800s - & clearly they were correct as the free access to books by the public has meant that almost no books at all have been printed & no authors have made any money from writing in the last 160+ years.]
Compare that to, for example, Game Of Thrones - which has been the most pirated (at least English language) TV show internationally - with each season being more pirated than the last - to the point where there were significantly more illegal downloads of the episodes of the 4th series than there were of E3.
...however, for example, in the UK the Season 4 DVD box still managed to sell a few copies(www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/game-of-thrones-becomes-fastest-selling-tv-box-set-of-the-decade__8166/), & the US (www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/game-of-thrones-becomes-fastest-selling-tv-box-set-of-the-decade__8166/)...
...whilst, although i can't see the figures thus far for S4, in Australia, where there's historically been more of a delay before broadcasting & so a greater desire to pirate, S2 & 3 were in the top 20 DVD & Blu-Ray sales of 2014 (Australian Home Entertainment 2014 market data - Aheda).
Similarly, the whole of Bjork's Vulnicura leaked in lossless quality - but a rushed digital release (so physical copies weren't available) still saw it go top 20 in both the Billboard top 200 & the UK album charts...
...getting higher positions & first week sales & whatnot than Biophilia did - which didn't leak.
& then, as the most famous example of legal free downloading, you obviously had Radiohead's 'pay what you want premise' for in Rainbows, which still went gold in the US & UK despite all of the (potentially free) copies costing nothing & them not counting towards 'sales'.
Then, repeated studies of consumer habits have shown for years that the people who pirate the most also tend to spend the most on legal content (torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consumers-130510/ www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music www.cnet.com/au/news/pirates-more-likely-to-pay-for-legal-content-choice-survey/ torrentfreak.com/suppressed-report-found-busted-pirate-site-users-were-good-consumers-110719/ piracy.americanassembly.org/hadopi-says-lets-try-cutting-off-nose-to-spite-face/ etc, etc, etc.)
Now, obviously i'm not suggesting that anyone on here would solely pirate the new D2 album unless their circumstances were so tight that they couldn't afford it, & i obviously hope that it's a huge success - however the argument that pirated downloads or early leaks or whatever is going to break sales really isn't realistic...
...& instead the most coherent reason, 'if' it doesn't sell, is that it simply didn't connect with enough of an audience for people to want to spend part of their limited budgets on it - as it's nonsense to suggest that the potential of (copyright infringing) free access to culture means that people won't buy anything as there's simply no objective evidence to back this up.