Last June, a Angel Olsen teaser video surfaced on her label Jagjaguwar’s YouTube channel. Looking for details about the enigmatic clip of Olsen in a tinsel wig, some listeners ran it through the song-recognition app Shazam. They discovered the synth-drenched track previewed was titled “Intern,” and that it was from an album called My Woman. The only problem: Olsen’s album wasn’t supposed to have been announced for a couple of weeks.

As with rival apps including SoundHound, Shazam has been available on smartphones for almost a decade now, but premature album unveilings like Olsen’s seem more common lately. Earlier this month, Shazaming a Perfume Genius teaser brought word of an upcoming album, No Shape, that wasn’t formally announced until two weeks later. In January, the cover artwork for Father John Misty’s upcoming Pure Comedy was already visible on Shazam shortly before the official rollout. Last September, the album and song titles of the xx’s I See You could similarly be found on Shazam before they’d been revealed by the band. Others with art or information available on Shazam prior to a proper announcement over the last year include Animal Collective, Danny Brown, Dirty Projectors, Avalanches, Justice, Moby, Crystal Castles, and Warpaint.

This spate of Shazam-leaked publicity campaigns illustrates the sheer complexity of distributing music in a digital world. When a new album is on the way, a label’s distributor ensures the audio, metadata, and other details are provided to digital services ahead of the release date. All this data should be in the YouTube system, for instance, so that if something leaks, the label can quickly complete a takedown request. It’s during this several-week process that Shazam receives the info as well.

Part of the thinking behind having unreleased albums on Shazam is that once industry folks around the world start picking out singles, playing songs on the radio, or posting audio snippets, it’s helpful if listeners can learn what they’re hearing. “This gets messed up when you get really cute about trying to hold back the album title and making that part of the story,” Jagjaguwar founder Darius Van Arman acknowledges. And, as artists from Burial to Frank Ocean have long demonstrated, amid all the internet’s instant accessibility, a little elusiveness can go a long way. Secrecy sells.

But these Shazam leaks may have a positive side for artists and labels, too—so much so that some acts presumably “leak” their album announcements this way. “Sometimes it’s not accidental,” Van Arman says. “I think now when that happens it’s really intentional. It’s just a way to help people feel like they’ve discovered the information themselves.” Good luck finding a band who’ll admit their supposedly grassroots album-title discovery was Astroturfed, but it’s a reasonable hunch.

As for the Shazam spoiler of My Woman, Van Arman says it ended up being a happy accident. The abbreviated “Intern” video, and people finding out about Olsen’s hotly anticipated LP by Shazaming it, “performed as the album announcement in a viral way,” he notes. “I’d love to say we intended that. At the end of of the day it was a great result. The mysterious ‘Intern’ video was a breadcrumb trail to some news that people were excited to discover using Shazam.”