Yes, hearing the music for the first time is awesome no matter how you do it. I'll download a torrent to put on my mp3 player and listen to it like that, delete it when the album releases and buy it. It's what I did for LIVING THINGS.
I will listen to the album as soon as it is available via a leak as long as it is reasonable quality. If its garbled and static-y and shitty I won't touch it but I doubt we'd even get a leak of that quality.
Not sure what I said here in the thread, if I said anything, but I'm going to state my answer now as "fuck yeah, I'll listen to it". The time when you were forced into listening to an album on its release day has passed. Now, it's too hard to resist. It's do-able, but not for me.
I chose the second option in the poll. I will probably do the same thing with THP that I did for LT: listen to the opening track and an instrumental (if there is one). When LT had leaked, I did my best to avoid spoiling the whole album before I received my copy in the mail, so I just listened to LITE and Tinfoil. I had already heard BID and LGM by this point, of course.