Uh-oh, looks like those pesky Internet pirates just laid a big ol' "arrrrr MATEY" upside U2's collective head. Faithful viewer Aimon Larkin noted that the band's new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, is all over the P2P networks like a rash on anyone who sees Steve Ballmer naked-- and it's not slated for release for another couple of weeks, yet. It's one thing for fans to buy the album legitimately when given the choice, but since the only way to hear the music right now is to swipe it, we imagine the temptation is huge. And you know as well as we do just how many of those "I swear I'll buy the real album as soon as it comes out" promises will go unfulfilled because, hey, what's the rush?

So now we suppose it's put up or shut up time for U2, because they had a contingency plan for just this situation that some people considered a bit radical when it was first proposed. You may recall that the prospect of an Internet leak was big on the band's mind last July when someone stole a prerelease cut of the album during a photo shoot in France; as the Daily Telegraph reported at the time, Bono had said that if the album showed up online before its official release date, U2 would "release it immediately as a legal download on iTunes" in hopes that, given the choice between stealing the album via BitTorrent or buying it legitimately via the iTunes Music Store, the band's fans would choose the latter.

Granted, Bono was talking about what the band would do if the album had been leaked in July, four months in advance of its planned release; now that the real thing is slated to hit store shelves (both physical and virtual) in just two more weeks, there may be less incentive to rush out an iTMS release. Still, is there any particular reason not to post the album for sale on the iTMS two weeks early? The only potential downside we can see is that it might reduce the sales of CDs when the plastic version ships because early adopters will have already spent ten clams to download the album in order to hear it early. From a money perspective it wouldn't much matter, because the band probably makes as much from an iTMS download as it does from a CD purchase, but fewer CD sales means a potentially lower ranking in the charts.

At this point we'll just wait and see; as of broadcast time, the iTunes Music Store still wasn't showing the album for sale-- but Suprnova.org listed over a thousand BitTorrent seeds for it. If U2 does decide to release the album early via the iTMS, that'll be a nice coup for Apple, since apparently there are lots of U2 fans into the whole iPod/iTunes thing, at least if Amazon sales are any indication; faithful viewer Bill Palmer points out at iPodGarage that the iPod U2 Special Edition is the number one Early Adopter product in Computers (followed closely, incidentally, by the 40 GB iPod Photo and the 60 GB iPod Photo). So how 'bout it, Bono 'n' Pals?