here is a question I like to put to JK and any other music exc that maybe reading this.

Look on ebay right now and type in promo and you hit with over 8,000 cd promos for sale. Promo is seems are to some music labels are as bad as downloading a illegal mp3 from share site. The question I ask is why??? It seems music companys go to such lenghts to "pay the radio stations" to pay their NEXT big thing. So tell me why a selling a promo is worse then briding someone to play your song, are you worryed that your next big thing is a complete load of c***** and you dont want the song to get leaked out??? Or it could be a HIT and you want to rack in as music cash as possble and that odd 100 promos you sent out are going put a dent in your bank balance due to loss of sell?

So tell me which is it...?

I`m not really qualified to answer this, but they are ineresting points and a lot of the e-bay promo sales on E-bay, I can explain quite a lot about.
My Uncle(now retired), worked for the BBC on radio for years, and the amount of promos he was sent at his place of work and personally to his home was astronomical. I have rather a large collection of them here, which never got playlisted, in fact one of them is one of my all time favourite albums.
Anyway, so here he is retired, not in the best of health and he needs a clearout,he could have binned them, but he thought he would try E-bay, and they started to sell quite well being quite exclusive copies to collectors.
Recently, a good five weeks before one of my favourite bands new track was released it appeared on e-bay as a promo.I snapped it up instantly, and was e-mailed back by e-bay, saying that the users account had been suspended due to illegal activity.
What I am saying is that I don`t actually believe a lot of the promo cd/records are actually in as much abundance on the site as it would appear, and scamsters are at , using a technique of trying to get your money, on an obvious hit without actually having any copies.
Be wary .

In the 90s when i visited record fairs, there were at least as many promos on sale as bootlegs.

... and in 1978 I bought the Johnny Thunders solo-album at Record & Tape Exchange. One minuter after Johnny Thunders had sold 3 or 4 boxes to the shop ...

I also saw a single I did with CB Milton in a second-hand shop the day it was released.

I'm still grumbling about it.

I'd be upset if I was running a major label...
I was in Music & Tape Exchange on Friday just after they'd had a big delivery of promo's from a Radio 1 DJ!
What I don't get is why labels make promo's so attractive to Joe Bloggs? Most of them have unique covers, extra mixes or instrumental versions not available elsewhere, of course the general public will want to buy them!

Some years ago I worked on a second-hand record stall. Promo copies were our bread and butter really.

The bloke used to go to town twice a week and pick up a hundred or so at a time. They were things that had been reviewed that week and otherwise would have been dumped to make room for the next lot.

It was all very clandestine and hush-hush because it shouldn't have been happening. But if we hadn't sold them they'd have gone into the bin.