After many nagging attempts on getting the mp3 recordings from a new act for circulation this week, I went onto their Myspace site, clicked the stupidly available "download" button, bundled the whole lot into a zip file and sent them back to the artist under an e-mail entitled...

"What have you just learnt?".

I think a fundamental principle to bear in mind is that you must never ever give anything away for free. It must be in exchange for something, whether that be an e-mail address, a click on an ad, a recommendation to a friend or a bit of cash.

It's obvious that in this case, where you are setting up a paid distribution, the artists must stop giving away the same tracks for free.

The daftest thing is Michael, the bundle of tracks I took from my own artist, are in a high enough quality format for our own distros to let out on the marketplace.

Sometimes I feel that it`s a lose-lose situation from us that try and get people to "make it" and those that feel we don`t do enough for them, and get impatient.

If you think artists are stupid Mart, what about the labels?

The Sony website "streams" songs by artists from their website to your pc, it does that by downloading the track to your hard drive into your temporary internet folder. So if you like the track you simply go into your temporary internet folder and simply copy the track to your desktop/music folder or where ever!

Even the ROTD website does this with their daily tracks!