IT’S enough to make a grown man cry, even a hardened rocker in his sixties.

The first studio album from the Rolling Stones in eight years, A Bigger Bang, has been illegally posted on the internet a week before its official release.

The rocking grandads have joined a stellar line-up of music stars including Oasis, U2 and the rapper Eminem to fall prey to internet pirates.

Music fans were able to download most of the album from several websites yesterday. The unofficial release will be short-lived given that the album is due out Monday, but it has the potential to cost the Stones millions in lost sales.

The illegally posted tracks are understood to be bootlegs of songs that have been legally broadcast on radio and the internet, including the band’s own website, since Monday.

“The first low-quality files of new Rolling Stones music were found illegally posted on Monday, the same day we began making the new album available for consumers to listen to via radio and streaming,” a spokeswoman for EMI, the Stones’ record company, said.

She added: “It is actually a major achievement to keep an album secure until this close to the commercial release date.”

Record companies go to great lengths to try to prevent albums from being illegally posted on the internet, including putting digital “watermarks” on to the recordings so that they can monitor which version of a song has been released. EMI employs teams of people assigned to the task of monitoring, tracking and investigating leaks.

However, music industry insiders believe that bands sometimes deliberately release tracks from forthcoming albums as a marketing ploy.

The acceleration of the online piracy movement has been fuelled by the increasing availability of high-speed internet connections that allow a song to be downloaded in seconds, and by a blossoming number of file-swapping sites such as Grokster and Kazaa.

Ironically, the Rolling Stones helped to usher in the internet age a decade ago by allowing their single Start Me Up to be used in an advertising campaign for Microsoft.

Since then, many big releases have been spoiled by illegal postings. Don’t Believe the Truth, the most recent album by Oasis, appeared on eBay a month before the official release.

Last November Universal Music was hit twice in as many weeks when U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and Encore by Eminem appeared on internet file swapping sites weeks before their scheduled release dates.

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