The Spice Girls - remember them? - saw their new album released two weeks early this week, when its eleven tracks made an unauthorised appearance on controversial MP3 sharing service Napster, we hear.

Terrible stuff, we're sure, but there are enough pre-pubertal girls and spotty, adolescent males who like this stuff [Damn, he's provoked a flame war - Ed] and will be grabbing the likes of Holler, Get Down With Me, If You Wanna Have Some Fun and the aptly-named Wasting My Time, even as we speak.

The RealPlayer Network apparently showcases four tracks as part of a RealAudio 8 promo here. Alas someone at Virgin appears to have uploaded all the album's tracks, and clever users figured out their URLs from the promo'd tracks locations and the album's already-published tracklist.

A number of downloads and a Real-to-MP3 conversion later, and the tracks appeared on Napster. ®

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