David Emery OnlineExperiment
6 April 2007
At work, I’m embarking on a little experiment.
Currently, we send out quite a few CDs to to journalists, DJs etc and also music bloggers, in the hope that they ideally review the CD or at least to get a band on their radar. It’s a process that’s been going on for decades, and is pretty much the foundation of the record company <-> journalist relationship.
Now, obviously this strays directly into pretty murky ethical territory; simply by sending someone a CD we’ve automatically changed their relationship with both the record and the band, compared to if they had discovered a band themselves. Also, by giving someone a CD there’s automatically an assumption that we’d like that person to either review it, or to look at that band in more detail – after all, we’re giving them someone a CD so surely we expect something in return, right?
This kind of activity has got a lot of attention recently in the blog world (I’m currently trying to reduce my usage of the word “blogosphere”), with things like Pay Per Post getting a huge amount of negative press.
Which leads directly on to the experiment.
Basically, I’m going to start sending out limited quantities of CDs to “regular” bloggers – I’m pretty sure no other record company is doing this at the moment.
This is, in part, inspired by the success Hugh has been having with Stormhoek and hinges on some of the same principles: firstly, I’m not doing this to try and get bloggers to post reviews of CDs. Most “normal” bloggers don’t regularly post CD reviews, so it would be really weird to try and get them to.
Secondly, it really is just an experiment – I’m not hoping for anything specific to come out of this, it’s more about trying to become more involved with the community. I’m not going to lie and say that it wouldn’t be nice if people talked about the CDs, but that’s really not what it’s about. What I think is most interesting is that most record companies in my experience don’t even realise that this community even exists; sure, eventually they’ve come to realise the importance of music bloggers – sites like Pitchfork (not that it’s really a blog) and Stereogum – but to them, that’s it.
To them, there are no blogs outside of music blogs.
So, when I say I’m pretty sure no other record company is doing this at the moment I think it’s primarily because they think they already are – they already send out CDs to bloggers, blinkered to the fact that there are millions more out there.
The final point is that at this stage of the game this experiment is strictly limited – I simply don’t have the resources to send out hundreds of CDs. That said, if you’re interested, and have an active blog please either drop me a line a leave a note in the comments.