Kanye West and Jay Z were so protective of ‘Watch The Throne’ that it is the first album in recent memory to have been released without a leak.

You could say both artists used ‘military tactics’ to prevent the album from being exposed on to the web. This included keeping all studio recordings and tracks offline and using hard drives with fingerprint recognition in secure briefcases. It almost feels like a CIA style operation to keep intruders out of the loop.

Other artists should take note of the extreme care Jay Z and Kanye took to protect the album from leaks. It is virtually impossible to prevent album uploaded on the web if your content is available digitally. The reason for this is that hackers, employees, journalists or anyone else who has access to your music can upload it. Most people working on the album would never do such a thing, but sometimes it just takes a good hacker to get the email password and download files on it.

Will Kanye and Jay Z establish the standard for preventing album leaks, or was this just a huge bit of luck? In my view, if you want to prevent a leak, no person should be able to upload the music to a computer connected to the internet; In addition, it shouldn’t be left on any hard drive that can be accessed, including memory sticks and DVDs/CDs. Any physical data that can be viewed by a human being outside of the close studio circle, is a hazard.

The best ways to protect your content if you want to stay online is to have it encrypted, and access it with a password that is not stored anywhere physically. This way, the only person who can access your encrypted file is you. However this is still not a bulletproof solution, if your computer has a virus. By typing in your encrypted password, a virus could transmit that data to a remote computer that could then start to download what you just accessed.

It’s still early days for music artists to take on piracy of their albums, but hopefully people can learn from these two, and be extra vigilant throughout the whole process.