I‘m a fairly regular reader of Hypebot, and today I came across post there, Skybox Offers Their Fans An Alternative to Filesharing, which covers a dialogue Skybox opened with their fans offering a win/win proposal to those who download their record from filesharing sites.
They suggest that anyone who likes the album pick a favorite song, and email it to 10 friends. On their website Skybox supports this request by including share buttons on all the music players on the site. Here’s the original post on the Skybox website: http://skyboxmusic.com/2010/04/filesharing-ok-cool-but-do-us-a-favor-too/
I had never heard of Skybox, but any band who understands fan engagement and puts their fans first (which Skybox is clearly doing), always gets me intrigued. So I popped over to their site to listen to some music. The first track I came across was In a Dream, which they were offering as a download in exchange for an email address. I did, in fact, like the song, so right then-as I was completely inspired by what the band is doing on a fan engagement level, as well as backing that up with good music-I decided that I needed to take them up on their offer and help them share their music. At the bottom of this post you will find the music player embedded.
And please understand that Radical Notion (independent media) has nothing to do with the band Skybox in any way. The band did not ask me to write this post, and we don’t have any business of any kind set up with them. Again, I had never even heard of the band before today. I simply am inspired by the way Skybox are focusing on their fans, and think that more of this type of interaction needs to be highlighted. And any band doing so deserves the attention.
So I’ll go ahead and say the same thing to our fans, and to the fans of Mother/Father-if you download any of our music off the filesharing sites (or even directly from us, for that matter) and like it, please pick your favorite song and share it with your friends. There are plenty of sharing tools on our store, Radical Notion Digital: store.radicalnotion.net
And I’ll end this post with a quote from Don Bartlette, the manager of Skybox, “Regardless of your moral stance on filesharing, I think it’s important to always be working to bring fans into the fold rather than marginalizing them.”
And here’s the Skybox player:
//stinson (my other blog: www.producernotes.com my Twitter profile: @stsn)
