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Punk tracks accidentally pressed onto Beyonce’s Lemonade vinyl

By | Published on Tuesday 19 September 2017

Beyonce

An unknown number of vinyl copies of Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ album mistakenly feature the first five tracks of Canadian punk band Zex’s recent ‘Uphill Battle’ LP. The error was noticed when at least one fan took the unusual step of actually playing a piece of vinyl they’d bought.

The vinyl release of Beyonce’s most recent album came out last week, but due to a pressing error some stock featured the incorrect tracks on Side A. In a statement, Sony Music said: “Due to human error at the Celebrate Records plant in Germany, which Sony uses to manufacture vinyl, a small amount of the European run of the Beyonce ‘Lemonade’ vinyl included music from Canadian punk band, Zex, on Side A”.

And before you start claiming that this was a ruse to promote Beyonce’s favourite Canadian punk band, the statement continued: “Beyonce and Zex were not aware of or responsible for the mispress. Fans who purchased the vinyl will be refunded and given a replacement copy. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused”.

Of course, that assumes two things. One, that people will want to send back what has immediately become a collectors’ item. And two, that anyone will notice. A study published last year found that as many as 48% of vinyl buyers never actually play their records.

One distributor recently told CMU that vinyl will almost always be returned if there is damage to the cover, but that records pretty much never come back to them because of complaints about the quality of the record itself. Partly this is because, in the digital age, music fans will often opt to actually listen to tracks via their streaming platform of choice, but buy the vinyl release because they want a physical representation of their tastes. Mainly though, it’s because people are awful.

Beyonce has not commented on any of this, though Zex have been gleefully posting coverage of the error in publications like Vanity Fair and Variety to their Facebook page.



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