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Music promotion is something that, just like the broader music industry landscape, has changed a huge amount over the years.

Back in the days of vinyl, labels would send out reaction sheets -- photocopied bits of A4 you had to fill in and fax back in order to keep receiving music. Vinyl being expensive, and addictive in a fetishistic kind of way, everybody filled them in and sent them back.

Now we have the internet, and nobody knows what a fax machine is for. We research and buy music online, we communicate with other music afficionados online -- naturally, we now promote online. 

Promotion is an important part of the music industry's arc.  It's got to be done, and a lot of the time people just don't bother.

But what are the outsource options available to labels wanting to promote something they're about to release? And can they do it themselves? 

Electro Public is based in Binyamina, Israel and is closely tied into Boa Group and Psymag.com. These are the guys responsible for creating those dreadful animated GIF adverts that get cross-posted on forums; and, as I'll attempt to show, they're also responsible for decimating the final-line sales of any label who runs promotion through them. 

Electro Public's internet promotion starts at 299 Euro. For this, they will create one of those mad GIFs and post it on forums for you. They'll also send information out to their own newsletter of about 10,000 and the Psymag newsletter of about 12,000. 

It's a tempting package for a new label, or an artist releasing their own material. Picking up 10,000 email contacts is going to take a long time, although it raises the fairly obvious question as to the relevance and up-to-date-ness of the email list itself. Has anyone subscribed to their update list lately? Or are they just using the same addresses they've had for several years? 

Electro Public's core business comes in the form of physical promotion. They will "print, pack, burn and ship" a bundle of promotional CDs and send them to media, DJs, shops, distributors and internet radio people around the world. In short, anyone who will listen.

50 of these promotional CDs will run you about 500 Euro. 100 of them will run you 600 Euro. 

If you've got money to pump into your release promotion, for 1,199 Euro they will send out 365 promotional CDs. 

It's worth considering at this point that in the current climate, selling 500 albums is considered a "success". Let's not lament how shit this figure is, nor how internet piracy and soulseek and blablabla have conspired to make the unthinkable a reality. Stick some trippy artwork or a chick on the front cover and you might sell more, but 500 is a solid benchmark for what to expect.

Given this target of 500, do you really want to give away 365 copies? 

Electro Public's list of Djs might also include people who you were marketing your release to. Every recipient of a freebie is a potential 'consumer', one of those guys who might just have parted with ten bucks to buy your release rather than just get it for free -- or more accurately, get it at cost to the label.

Chaishop have been in the trance game for years, and they were the first crew to properly marry doof culture and internet technologies together way back in 1997. They missed the beat when other internet promotion companies launched their services, but with added bonuses like banners across all Chaishop online properties and sponsored inclusion in their Podcast, their approach marks one of the most cohesive online promotion packages around.

It doesn't come cheap; full promotion will set you back 350 Euros per month, and the Lite option of 175 Euro/month lacks the weighty features that set Chaishop apart. 

Mushroom Magazine is that lovely little mag that comes out of Germany every couple of months, that lasts slightly less than one shit. Carry it into the bathroom, go about your business, and finish the mazgaine before time, meaning you have to read the back of a bottle of shampoo or something until nature has run its course. 

They are dear, dear people -- fighting on until the last, despite the fact that their magazine's global penetration only reached 16% of psyreviews.net readers  when we conducted an admittedly wholly inaccurate straw poll in 2007. 

Promotion to an email list of 12,000 people  plus forum posting will set you back EUR330. 

Triskele Management offer a sliding scale on their promotion products, so as such the info I have is only anecdotal, and also a year or so out of date. 

Posts on 75 forums will run you EUR150, and broadcast of your release to their mailing list runs EUR150. In addition to this they host audio samples, and include fairly verbose track-by-track descriptions.

Promotion companies, both within and without the psy orb, operate on the basis that an email list is worth something.  The wider internet marketing community also preaches this; take a look at Fanbridge or Constant Contact as broader examples. 

Without question, amassing a list of 10,00+ email addresses for your product is going to take some time. So the prospect of "renting" broadcast access to a list of this size is a tempting one.

Subtract from that 10,000 a proportion of dead or not-often-checked email accounts (20%?), then take into consideration spam filters (10%?) and you're faced with a problem of just what sort of integrity this list has. And this is before we consider those people who automatically delete a promotional email without reading it (an unknown percentage, but one that would increase over time as web users become more savvy and rely on non-invasive methods of finding out about music such as Last.FM, Spotify, etc.) 

In short, the power and value of an email list is far less now than it was in 2006, before user-based music discovery was a reality. By 2011, I would expect an email list to be just about as useful as the 1's and 0's of which the binary data is comprised (i.e. negligible.)

The key issue with promotional companies is something I would call Guilt By Association. I know I'm not the only person whose heart sinks when he sees the familiar Electro Public package landing on the doormat, who makes a pre-judgement of bad quality product inside that Schroedinger's Cat of unopened music packaging. I know this because it's a frequent topic of discussion and dissent. 

I know I'm not the only person who finds those animated GIFs and forum-blasted release "infomercial" posts offensive and dull.  I know this because the View Count on the forum post stays low, and because the post itself dissapears off the page after little more than a week. 

People prefer to discover music themselves -- not to have music, by way of a promotion company, discover them. Question what you can do off your own back, question whether a promotion company is offering you anything tangible, and question what difference that tangible offering will make to your bottom line.

If you're gagging for self-promotion opportunities, you may want to check this post detailing forums you can join up to and plug your releases on -- at no more cost than an evening's tea and herb.