A Portland experimental folk ensemble the began way before it was cool to be a Portland experimental folk ensemble, Norfolk and Western pleasantly surprise me with each new album. I was excited, then, to learn last week that the band began streaming its new album, Dinero Servo, on its Web site.
A week later, though, I still can't tell you what that album sounds like. That's because the band's streaming process requires listeners to enter their e-mail address on their Web site, then wait up to a couple days for an access code, then enter that access code for the link to the music. I'm still on step two of that cumbersome process, waiting for a link that may or may not arrive in my inbox one day.
There's a take away message here for bands trying to promote themselves:
Don't rock the boat. If you choose to stream your music for free, don't demand contact information in return; just stream your record. MySpace certainly makes that plenty easy; there are also about a dozen other free players that will do it for you, too.
And don't be so arrogant as to assume listeners will go out of their way to hear your record stream. Norfolk and Western apparently tried to use streaming their new record as a guise to compile a bank of e-mail addresses, a crass marketing ploy that seriously overestimates the value of their product. There are thousands of other bands streaming their records for free on far cleaner interfaces; it's no longer newsworthy when even the biggest musicians in the world debut their records for free on MySpace. And unlike Norfolk and Western's new album, you can actually access all those other albums easily.
