I think if you target an artists’ CORE group of fans, this is a goldmine waiting to happen. For example, Sarah McLachlan has a small and very devoted mailing list of fans affectionately known as ‘Fumblers’. The emailing-list has been around since 1994. These are fans that are naturally going to yack their heads off about anything and everything Sarah anyway, so why not put Sarah’s music in their hands?

Sounds like money waiting to happen, but the labels can’t get past the whole ‘we are GIVING away music, so that means LOST sales!’ mentality. Ah well.

JD I think you are right, and again since you would be choosing your own CD, odds are you are going to get an artist that you already like anyway, so the odds are that much higher that the label would get a favorable review for the CD, AND one for the promotion itself!

I *really* wish someone from a label could comment on this, if any of you lurking can comment from the label’s point of view, please jump in! Tell us what we are missing here.

The music business as a whole has lost the plot in terms of marketing, and that’s what’s being reflected in the sinking sales of CDs (NOT pirating.) The industry depends almost exclusively on radio airplay to get the word out. They’re still figuring out the whole internet thingy. As for print, about the only vehicles to get reviews out are Rolling Stone, Blender, and a couple of others. Publications like Billboard, Radio and Records, and CMJ just don’t make it out to the public.

Truth be told, the music industry could make a lot more if they’d go back to demo discs. Very few record stores pass out free demos anymore, but that would be a marketing goldmine if they did. Put a good song on a CD single (plus a few snippets of other album songs), pass them out for free at Tower, Virgin, or any other retail record store, and boom, there ya go. The stores here in Memphis do this occasionally, but not enough. Music companies are worried that the demo discs would be pirated (their favorite crutch) and so they don’t put them out. A good example of how it could work, though, is Monitor This.

As for the blogs, with hundreds of hits per day, why would you NOT want to put your product out there unless you felt it was inferior!

The one big problem with the idea is that bloggers will have no incentive to write favorable reviews. Unless you add some kind of payola into the mix, it might backfire… and we KNOW that this industry would never think of doing a payola sham =;-)