Steal This Album!
2002 studio album by System of a Down
Steal This Album! is the third studio album by the American heavy metal band System of a Down, released on November 26, 2002, by American Recordings and Columbia Records. Produced by Rick Rubin and Daron Malakian, it peaked at number 15 on the US Billboard 200.
Background
In the early half of 2002, a collection of medium-quality MP3s was leaked onto the internet under the name Toxicity II. The band issued a statement expressing disappointment that fans were hearing material that was unfinished, and they worked to release completed, higher-quality versions of the tracks, which became Steal This Album!. The album's title referred to the unauthorized distribution of the recordings, while also alluding to Abbie Hoffman's 1971 book Steal This Book!.
Though often reported in the media as a collection of B-sides and outtakes, the band insisted that the Steal This Album! material is of the same quality as the tracks that made it onto Toxicity; vocalist Serj Tankian has said that the songs were left out of Toxicity "because they didn't fit the overall continuity of the album". In May 2009, drummer John Dolmayan revealed that the album is his favorite System of a Down release. Similarly, Tankian also called the album his favorite System of a Down album in a 2012 AMA on reddit.
A first version of "Streamline" was used in The Scorpion King soundtrack, which was released in early 2002, and as a B-side on the CD2 edition of "Aerials".
“Steal This Album!” enters the record as 2002 studio album by System of a Down. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Steal, Album and studio can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q332526. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 1971, 2009 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Steal This Album!” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.