Dear band that I’ve never really heard of before,

Hey, whatup Harvey Danger? Would you believe that I’ve never heard of you before today? It’s true! I tend to not pay a lot of attention to music that was recorded within the last five or ten years, which I guess means that I’m not “hep” or whatever it is the kids are calling it these days. Anyway, you were a complete unknown to me until today.

Man, you crazy indy rocker kids and your wacky ideas about marketing. I read somewhere on the internet today (perhaps on Waxy?) that you were releasing mp3’s of your latest album for free as some sort of promotional stunt. Something about getting new listeners, exposing more people to your music at basically no cost to yourself. That’s a wild idea! I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work, though. After all, how can a band be successful without a major label spending lots of money on them to push their music out through radio-payola land? Your stunt just can’t work.

Since it was free, however, I fired up bittorrent and pulled down a copy of your album. I’m putting it on to my iPod right now and I think I’m going to go and listen to it as soon as it’s done transferring. From the song I heard while I was writing this, I’d say that it could be a pretty good album. Heck, if the rest of the album is this good I just might go out and buy the CD (I like having the physical artifact — go figure). But your “give the music away to build a larger fan base” strategy still can’t work — it’s just not the way things are done. Even if I do go out and buy your CD….

Sincerely,

cp

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Letters to Nobody. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.