As Oscar Wilde might have said, had he lived a century later, to have some of the music leaked from one new album is unfortunate; to have music leaked from two is just careless.

And careless was the word to describe U2 singer Bono’s actions during the week, when he inadvertently broadcast four songs from the band’s upcoming record, No Line on the Horizon the second time such misfortune has befallen the Dublin super-group.

Apparently, Sir Bono was playing them extremely loudly at his French villa – too loudly, as a passing Dutchman heard the music, recorded it on his mobile phone and uploaded the results to YouTube.

In all fairness, it sounds too bizarre to be true – a quickwitted, U2-loving Dutchman randomly strolling by Bono’s home in France, while the middle-aged millionaire rocks out like a demon inside – but such is the official version of events. To add to the air of weirdness, the sound of crashing waves and seagulls can even be heard on the audio, though many music fans have expressed regret that the seagulls weren’t a little higher in the mix, and Bono’s voice a little lower.

Bizarre or not, the leaking of material before its official release is a common phenomenon in the entertainment world, and becoming ever more common because of digital technology.

Years ago, if you ‘came across’ the original studio tapes of Michael Jackson or Madonna’s new album, you’d have a hard job copying and selling them. Indeed, you’d have a hard job alerting the world to their existence in the first place.

Nowadays, the most rudimentary phone will record sound and pictures, there are tonnes of filesharing and Web 2.0 sites, and within two minutes of uploading, the global online community will have listened, told all their friends and, in all probability, expressed their regret about those seagulls not being higher in the mix.

And this is the second time it’s happened to Bono, Edge and the two other fellas. Four years ago, tracks from their last album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, were leaked after a CD was stolen from a photo shoot, again in the South of France. Does that area hold some sort of hoodoo for U2 or what?

The means by which music is stolen, borrowed, copied or otherwise wrongfully acquired are many and various. It can come from a CD mastering plant or radio station promo copy. It can be wheedled out of a PR company through subterfuge or posted up on the ’Net by a disgruntled former employee.

And at this stage one could almost make out a list of acts that haven’t had their material broadcast before it was meant to be. In the last few years alone, such diverse acts as wuss-rockers Coldplay, fratboy oiks Linkin Park, mercurial singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, notorious (and absurdly named) R’n’B star R Kelly, winsome songstress Fiona Apple and the great White Stripes have had albums, or part thereof, leaked.

Guns N’ Roses also had some of their long-awaited Chinese Democracy leaked, but as this will probably never be released anyway, it was all rather a moot point. Meanwhile, rapper Lil’ Wayne actually called one of his records The Leak, in ironic tribute to the music pirates who nabbed his material.

And pirating – such an amusingly anachronistic term – isn’t restricted to music. Bootleg movies are a long and proud tradition in cinema, and form the economic bedrock of South-East Asia.

They’ve now moved on from a man smuggling a camcorder into the cinema, to sophisticated digital facsimiles of the original.

Film scripts aren’t immune, either. The screenplay for the new Quentin Tarantino movie was this week reportedly posted onto several websites, though many cinema pundits were baffled at the news, as they had always assumed that the terminally infantile director just made it all up as he was going along.

Other scripts alleged to have been leaked included those of the last Indiana Jones picture, videogame adaptation Gears of War, M Night Shyamalan’s The Village, and Mel Gibson’s pious epic, The Passion of the Christ.

Even the mighty machine that is the Harry Potter franchise is powerless against the curse of leaking. In 2007, digital photographs of each page of the last book in the series were made available online. Considering those books run to about 11,000 pages, the amount of work involved in doing this suggests either an admirable commitment to the democratisation of publishing, or an insane hatred of JK Rowling.

Industry powers-that-be, particularly in music, do their utmost to try and prevent this sort of thing happening. They issue ‘cease and desist’ orders to websites and other publishing sources. They preview albums for rock critics on locked iPods in locked rooms in foreign countries. They send out CDs under false names. They prosecute file sharers.

And yet all this material keeps reaching the public. A cynical mind might suggest – might, we repeat – that it’s conceivable that sometimes, just sometimes, these ‘leaks’ may possibly be instigated by the record companies, as a very clever, subtle, indirect form of advertising; what the denizens of that soulless world would call ‘guerrilla marketing’.

Andrew Lynch is an experienced music critic, in print and on radio, and he believes that “it’s highly likely that, in at least some cases, the band are deliberately doing it themselves as a marketing ploy. There’s so much competition these days, they’re willing to do almost anything to get their names in the paper. Also, the quality of the leaks is usually pretty bad so most fans are going to feel obliged to buy the CD anyway.”

So there is presumably little for Bono et al to fear from this latest boo-boo. They’ll sell eight billion copies of their album as per usual, the world will keep spinning, and as for those seagulls? A record contract could be winging its way to them as we speak...