Last month, Sandrarose.com was invited to New York to attend the ultra private Kanye West, Jay Z listening session for their much-anticipated album Watch The Throne. While listing our reasons for declining the invite (including our fear of flying) we mentioned that we would wait for the project to leak online first and then hold our own listening party here in Atlanta.

Surely, we thought, such a coveted album would leak online in advance of the listening session in New York? “No it won’t. I’m telling you!,” our Def Jam source responded confidently.

Watch The Throne dropped on iTunes at midnight last night, and in doing so, it became the first major rap album to avoid a leak in Hip Hop history. How did they do it?

According to music producer @CliffordHenson, the answer is provided by Kanye’s engineer/producer Mike Dean in this video where he states he doesn’t work in studios anymore because of the “leak factor.”

“We haven’t had a record leak since we quit working in the studios,” says Dean. (Click here to watch the video.)

Instead of studios, Dean said he sets up shop to record in luxury hotel suites, and he never emails music files to anyone. “We’ll put somebody on a plane with a hard drive before we even send one mp3 somewhere,” Dean said.

Indeed, we recall reading somewhere that Kanye West and Jay Z recorded parts of their historic album in a luxury hotel in New York.

This isn’t good news for cash strapped recording studios which depends on rappers to pay $100s of dollars per hour for recording time.

Watch The Throne is available in retail stores on August 12.