also he's arguing with someone named gorillavsbear.

Hey I actually agree with both of you.

Pretty much.

so following every wish of the PR firms is what the music industry is supposed to be doing? are you serious?

good. it's shocking/pathetic that this dude has a career.

The PR firms are doing their job. They can't help it that 99.9% of journalists whether they be bloggers or newspaper writers or whoever are so lazy and content starved that they will just repeat what they are fed. This isn't breaking news.

You'd kill for publicity like that for your label.

i thought you were referring to the journalists.

actually, no, i wouldn't kill that at all. for the record, my label has been covered by quite a few blogs in the 'inner circle'. pretty pointless imo, because a large percentage of the people that frequent those blogs are just mp3/hype leeches, and not interested in actually spending $ on physical product. i sold more records from 1 post on OMG Vinyl than all of the 'tastemaker' blogs combined.

Artists make art, consumers want to consume some art, any art. The job of labels and their PR people is to facilitate that, right?

That's all I'm saying really.

Did whiney actually make a box with tweets to sale?

Yep, it was a compilation of the first year of his 1,000 album review Tweets from 2009. He had a 33 1/3 book published and also has this coming out: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2 ... -deal.html

I think the last one is what's caused him to get the most flack (for obvious reasons) but if someone cut me a check for compiling a bunch of user-submitted content you wouldn't have to ask me twice either.

Alright already.

I'm gonna agree with 100% Dale here...
From what I have experienced (on the rock/metal side of the blogosphere), while getting press and exposure on the hype blogs is great for traffic, most of the time it does not translate for sales.

These hype blogs are great for getting the hipsters to fight tooth and nail for tickets to your show (so they can say they were there) and will buy a shirt, (which they wil wear to death over the next month or two), till the next big thing comes around...Music is the last priority cause that is easy to find for free.

My label has two releases coming out in the next two months. We have not done any official press yet. I leaked a little bit of news to one blog that is a bit popular and has a decent size forum community, and I posted in my thread here. Since I started my label thread on obner, I have made about 20 sales of various releases of mine. I know there is only a small handful of you'ze who even go into the metal thread or who bothered to actually read what i posted in my label thread, and I know that only a very small portion of those people were the ones who bought anything....That means it was some of our silent lurkers or even random visitors who may never grace obner again.

In grand scheme, 20 sales is laughable, but when you are only manufacturing 250 or so of a product, those numbers don't suck at all....

press and publicity and exposure on those sites is great and may help traffic, but it's the obner's of the intra-web where the $$ is actually made. *group hug*

Echoing Dalen and Twilight. There are niche communities that are so isolated (for better or worse) that sometimes your best bet is to focus your efforts rather than cast a wide net. I love punk rock, but moreso pop punk. I get all my band/news/releases info from the pop punk message board. I've never directly visited interpunk or punknews.org (THEE sites for merch and hype) to get a scoop.

I follow Whiney on twitter. Never really had a problem with what he says, and for the most part think he's fighting the good fight in exposing bands. Had no problem with the box o' tweets simply because if someone was willing to pay for it, so be it. Guy has to eat. On the other hand, this new book of Hipster Puppies is lame. But once again, dude has to eat. If someone is willing to buy it, let them look on their shelf next year and take that purchase in. Then again, I'm the one who got "When Garden Gnomes Attack" from my sis for Christmas so...who am I to judge?

**gasp**

Our own/former(?) katie, a princess brushes up against the core of the indie echo chamber dilemma, with regard to how bands get chosen for festivals and what that all means.

It meanders a bit, but you can sense she's as pissed about the broken-ness of the whole thing as us and Whiney are.

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/immaculate- ... ying-breed

what lamebrain would hand over their own money for fucking tweets jesus fucking christ i just quit

we

The "are" on the end of Chad's sentence is messing it up grammatically; remove it and I think the "us" is correct.

Its the internet, folks. Not a thesis paper.