Tool fans found themselves getting rather excited this weekend, with the band appearing to finally make their streaming debut with their 1991 demo tape.
For years now, Tool fans have asked themselves a couple of questions. Namely, “when is the album coming?”, and “when will their music finally hit streaming services?”
While we recently discovered that Tool are set to release their first album since 2006’s 10,000 Days on August 30th, the group’s aversion to their music being on streaming services has been something of a secondary mystery to their fans.
Back in 2017, it was reported that Tool were in talks with their label about finally getting their music put onto streaming services, just months before rumours of a series of vinyl remasters was also touched upon.
Of course, throughout all of this debacle, fans were quick to blame frontman Maynard James Keenan, who describes himself as something of a noted curmudgeon.
Assuming the band’s absence from streaming platforms was due to Maynard’s attitudes to technology and a hatred for music to not be heard in sequential order, the vocalist took to Twitter earlier this year to note that fans who pointed their fingers at him were in fact “squawking at the wrong Tool.”
However, after profiles for the band’s music recently appeared on Apple Music and Spotify, fans believed that good things were set to happen, with the first-ever publicly-available release by Tool showing up on streaming services this weekend.
First released back in 1991, the band’s 72826 demo has now appeared on services such as Apple Music, Google Play, and even YouTube.
Undoubtedly a cheaper option that forking out over $1,000 on Discogs for a copy, the demo features early versions of classic tracks like ‘Sober’, ‘Hush’, ‘Part Of Me’, and the exceptional ‘Jerk-Off’, which was never re-recorded for a studio release.
However, as Loudwire reports, representatives for Tool have confirmed that the recent appearance of the band’s music on these services is not in fact official.
A cursory look at the YouTube page for each song appears to confirm this, with the video info noting that the song was provided by TuneCore, a service that allows aspiring artists to share their music on similar services.
While most releases in this vein are uploaded by record labels themselves, this could explain why only Tool’s demo tape has appeared on streaming services, with the self-released tape not being flagged for violating copyright, since it is not in fact owned by Sony Music Entertainment, who in turn own the distribution rights to the band’s songs.
Interestingly though, the copyright details do list Volcano Records, the label which has released all of Tool’s albums to date, though this does not necessarily mean these details were not added by whoever uploaded the tracks.
At this stage, it’s not clear if these songs will remain on streaming services (fans on Reddit note it is no longer on Apple Music), if Spotify will soon offer them up as well, if they’ll be taken down, or if Tool will make their official debut on streaming platforms when their as-yet-untitled fifth album is released next month.
Check out the demo version of ‘Sober’ by Tool:
