Image by Brian Solis

I get sent a lot of press releases. I have a really good filtering system for them too. I glance at them, see if there’s anything I need to know anything about, and then I bin them. But although I must be one of the hardest (or at least one of the most pointless) people to send stuff too, every now and then something cuts through.

So… what follows is not a sponsored post. This is essentially a clever piece of public relations from someone who clearly knows what they are doing, and I am walking into the trap of simply republishing press releases with both eyes open.

I’m going to let you read this one and see if you can figure out what attracted me to it - and what has led me to reprint it, verbatim, onto New Music Strategies. Answers at the end.

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Suburban Home Records, when faced with the complexity and unpredictability of online consumer behaviour, have thrown their hands up and said ‘Oh go on… just download the album already’.

Sometimes the adaptation process takes a bit of a leap of faith, and it looks like these guys are ready to take it.

The fine folk at Suburban Home Records [via Indie HQ] have decided to embrace the very technologies that the major record labels decry, and so now you can download a 14-track sampler:

I Celebrate Their Entire Catalog.

This from a label who has just sent out entire album downloads to customers who have pre-ordered the vinyl or CD. That is… they’ve been given the download before the pre-ordered physical album is available. That’s kind of interesting, right?

But perhaps what’s interesting here is not that they’re giving the album away, but that they’re giving it away using the same tools that some people use to distribute unauthorised copies.

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You can buy advertising on New Music Strategies. You can sell it too.

I’ll be straight with you: I’d like to make a little extra money for running this site. It’s competing with other things that occupy a lot of my time and focus, and I’d like to give it the attention it really deserves — especially with the podcast on the (very near) horizon, and New Music Ideas, the new sister site, already underway.

With that in mind, I’ve spoken to a few very smart business people and professional bloggers, who have suggested ways that advertising can be made to work more effectively on this site without being too obtrusive, without getting in the way of the content, and without jeopardising the integrity of the blog.

They were very positive about the specifically targeted nature of the site, and said nice things about it being attractive to certain types of advertisers, mostly from within the readership itself, which kind of works out nicely.

So I’ve taken these suggestions and added a neat little twist: I want to give you a large chunk of that money. I know a bit of extra pocketmoney can come in handy when you’re an independent musician or music business, and my whole point here is to be helpful to you guys. So… let me explain how this works.

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There’s a ‘Sky-Is-Falling’ article in the Guardian’s Blog about how mp3 bloggers are wiping out independent music. Here’s how to be part of the massacre.

A friend of mine sent me a link to Louis Pattison’s Thursday post on the Guardian Unlimited Arts blog. In it, Pattison claims that mp3 bloggers are killing the independent artists and businesses they claim to promote by giving their music away for free.

As my friend said, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…”

MP3 blogs, if you’ve missed the phenomenon, are regularly updated websites that talk about music and link to songs that their readers can download and listen to. Typically, the mp3 blog keeps itself to a particular subgenre of music, usually from the independent music end of the spectrum, rather than the more mainstream major label stuff.

Think of them as advocates, rather than pirates.

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