Jai Paul

Jai Paul is a British songwriter, record producer and recording artist.

His early demo "BTSTU" led to his online discovery and a subsequent recording contract with XL Recordings.

Paul's 2007 demo recording "BTSTU", hosted at his MySpace page, received widespread music blog coverage throughout 2010, including a feature in Guardian's New band of the week, resulting in UK national radio play.

International music press followed blog coverage of the track (with some publications shortening the song's title to "BTSU").

The song caught the attention of several record companies, Polydor mentioned among them, and a bidding war ensued, with Paul eventually signing with XL Recordings later that year.

Together with its follow-up "Jasmine", these songs have been regarded as influential on underground as well as mainstream pop music in the 2010s.

By December 2010, the BBC had long-listed Paul for their Sound of 2011 poll, asserting his style as "a startlingly fresh vision of 21st century pop music".

On 21 April 2011, XL Recordings officially released Paul's the reworked "BTSTU (Edit)" to acclaim, with the BBC's Zane Lowe commenting that "Jai (pronounced Jay) Paul is part Dilla / part D'Angelo but also full of individuality. An exciting prospect on the horizon."

On 20 May 2011, Canadian hip-hop artist Drake "officially leaked" a track titled "Dreams Money Can Buy" via his blog, October's Very Own.

The track features a sample of Paul's BTSTU prominently.

According to Alex Frank of The Fader, the song "End of Time" by American R&B artist Beyoncé contains the "same Jai Paul Sample from Drake's new song, only sped up."

On 30 March 2012, Paul uploaded a new demo titled "Jasmine (demo)" to his official SoundCloud page, subsequently receiving an official release via XL on 9 April 2012.

"Jasmine (demo)" received positive reviews, with Pitchfork featuring the song as a "Best New Track", The New York Times praising its "Prince era sensuality" and The Guardian describing the production as "amazing".

Later in 2012, Paul appeared as a guest on the deluxe version of Big Boi's 2012 album Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, having produced the track "Higher Res".

Paul also performed on the track alongside Big Boi and Little Dragon.

A demo album consisting of songs for his aborted debut album Bait Ones was leaked in 2013 and unofficially uploaded by an unknown source to the surprise and acclaim of critics, leading to Paul taking an extended hiatus from music.

On 14 April 2013, an unknown user uploaded a number of untitled tracks to Bandcamp, a music streaming and purchasing service that caters mainly for independent artists (artists without a record label).

These untitled tracks were made available for sale as an album.

Bandcamp is known for being vulnerable to scams and copyright infringement, with Consequence of Sound reporting in a feature that "Its response time to infractions is slow, and its built-in protections against scams appear minimal."

However, hours after the page's appearance, music press picked up on it and publicised it extensively, reporting the music as belonging to Paul and describing it as constituting his debut album, as well as including links to download the material in articles.

Paul and his record label denied having released the recordings, or authorising their release.

Owen Myers reported the music as having come from a personal laptop stolen from Paul himself, citing a comment made by Twitter user "@FatAmpNadia" as his source.

Major music press followed Myers' lead, and the stolen laptop story was universally reported.

It is unclear how "@FatAmpNadia" is involved.

Many journalists and commenters suggested the leak to be a cynically devised marketing plan on Paul and XL Recordings' behalf; having achieved the desired result, the two parties made false statements to the public "explaining away" the events.

Others conjectured that Paul did in fact upload the tracks himself, in an attempt to illegally leak and sell his music independently from record label XL Recordings and publisher BMG, seeing parallels with distinct situations involving unrelated artists.

Duncan Cooper of The Fader concludes that "In any case, the album's origins and officialness [sic] seem like something of a technicality", adding the opinion that "Jai Paul seems to be getting paid for it", despite the record company's claims otherwise.

Many publications opted to review the leaked material as an "album" with Gigwise commenting "there are moments that sound distinctly unfinished. There are periods of silence at the end of most tracks, there're only a few smooth segues between the skits and the tracks, and there are periods where the mixing of the vocal track sounds downright bad. The whole album doesn't feel as precisely balanced as you would expect from Jai Paul."

Despite being an unofficial release, the "album" was ranked in year-end lists, at number 32 in the music blog Pretty Much Amazings "40 Best Albums of 2013", number 28 in The Guardians "Best Albums of 2013", and number 20 in Pitchfork's "Top 50 Albums of 2013".

In August 2014, Pitchfork recognised the leak in its "The 100 Best Albums of the Decade So Far" list.

In March 2016, Jai and A. K. announced a new project titled Paul Institute.

The project was inaugurated with the release of A. K. Paul's debut single as a solo artist, "Landcruisin'".

Paul returned in 2019 with the official release of his leaked album and a new double single entitled "Do You Love Her Now / He".

In 2023, at Coachella, he performed live for the first time in his career.

Paul is from Rayners Lane in Harrow, northwest London, England.

He is of Indian descent.

In his one-and-only interview to date, Paul said that "music to me was just a hobby and, in a way, I didn't care about showing it to anyone."

He grew up listening to The Beatles, ELO, Queen and Michael Jackson and has been influenced by Björk.

His elder brother A. K. Paul is also a record producer, musician and songwriter.

Formal release of the leaked material, Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) (2019), was ranked number 95 in the publication's 200 Best albums of the 2010s.