Been saying this for a while and im so glad my crystal ball is in working order. Ok let's not get carried away. it is not a replacement for Physicals/Download or selling music but a necessary counterpart. If you are still giving your music away on Spamspace or gootube then think again. JK with over 100,000 video views with someone like Revver.com you could easily make over $2 CPM netting you over $200.00. Ok it's a fortune but add that to download sales, physicals etc and it is a nice sum and more than the 0 you are receiving now for the videos. (Forgive me JK im being very presumptious here). Plus it is the future. Like i said earlier it won't replace sales but will be an additional source of income.

Check it out here.

I discussed putting adverts on an album many many years ago with an advertising agency and they said it would never work !

Tony James did it 1985, with Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
Legend and folklore has it that a band called "Furniture" tried to buy advertising space on it and were declined.
They certainly claimed they did on a Radio interview, I would be intrigued to hear from Tony if they actually did.

Trio (Da Da Da) did sell the space on the cover of their second album (Mercury / Germany) to advertisers in 1981.

Been saying this for a while and im so glad my crystal ball is in working order. Ok let's not get carried away. it is not a replacement for Physicals/Download or selling music but a necessary counterpart. If you are still giving your music away on Spamspace or gootube then think again. JK with over 100,000 video views with someone like Revver.com you could easily make over $2 CPM netting you over $200.00. Ok it's a fortune but add that to download sales, physicals etc and it is a nice sum and more than the 0 you are receiving now for the videos. (Forgive me JK im being very presumptious here). Plus it is the future. Like i said earlier it won't replace sales but will be an additional source of income.
So is it revver.com paying or someone like Adbrite (or both)?

They both pay. Revver hosts the files as well which gives them the edge. There are many others adopting this model as well, including Blip TV. BlipTV don't have a very good stream rate at the moment but Revver does.
I think the fact that everyone is used to myspace and Youtube so converting to a paid solution would be easier for viewers. One other thing I would urge ALL independent artists and labels to join AIM so that their new service Merlin can negotiate licensing fees from the likes of Youtube and Myspace. It would be a critical mistake not to. With these options set for labels it would be perfectly possible to have an almost automated marketing/distribution channel for artists and labels and the income received from licensing and advertising would change the face of music marketing forever.

Frankly I think you're a little off the mark - it's a big assumption .. What I think is that people want some of their music for free - the stuff they're happy to listen to but wouldn't necessarily buy it anyway - and they want to buy and own without ads the music they're more passionate about.

iTunes has sold over 2.5 billion tracks .. think about that for a sec ..

I have often considered this idea, as I said previously, I was impressed when Sigue Sigue Sputnik did it, but I would be very irritated if my 1969 copy of Abbey Road kept telling me to buy Brylcreem or Old Spice, or, the defunct Daily Sketch for that matter.

Believe you me i know what i'm talking about here.
Itunes has sold 2.5bn downloads but over 200bn downloads have been swapped for free. Also when you think about it, Apple have sold over 100 million Ipods, now you do the sums. 25 legal downloads per Ipod. So people are not buying as much as to even scratch the surface of their Ipods.

The point i was making was this. There will always be sales but only a fraction of those who listen to your music will buy it. So how do you monetise the vast majority who do not and will not buy. Find a way to monetise it and make back more than you will make from the miniscule sales.

Now there will always be blockbusters but these are anomalies. You cannot build a business around the exceptional hit that you may or may not have. Check out how much it costs for you to put a record out vs how much you make back.

However, i understand there will always be those who poo poo the idea of marketing music with a tin of baked beans. For them I will offer FREE hosting of your music files and while i make all the money from Advertising you sign an online contract waiving your right to receive royalties. Oops Myspace already beat me to it !

I do like the idea, as I mentioned and in the i-pod age, it should not be too hard a job to update the attached advertising to a track when the MP3 player is plugged in for a recharge via a codec.

There will have to be target ad agencies though to make it work the same as TV adverts.
The skipping of an advert on an I-pod could become a universal obsession, that said, it does create another opening for writers and producers to make sure it isn`t, by creating genuinely "commercial" commercials.

It still remains chicken and egg.

As an advertiser I would want somebody who has a public profile to benefit my product. I am not going to advertise with an unknown or aspiring, indeed why should should I?

So this doesn't solve the issue that only the very thin layer at the top is generating significant revenue on downloads. The proposal of advertising is just moving the deckchairs about with the ship is still steadily sinking.

There are many ways to do this. Even if you don't blatantly put ads in the mp3 you certainly can have a message put up with lyrics of the song etc. We are used to seeing ads everywhere and in a way you want the ads to be annoying so people can go and buy the high quality ad free version.

Unless you are attracting people by the several thousand you are not a good prospect for the advertisers.

We are used to seeing ads everywhere and this leads us to being ad-blind, repetition is required by the advertiser and placing ads effectively at random on iPods is not enticing for them.

It's not advertising you're asking for it's sponsorship - which bands get sponsored?

Nowadays one of the costs for a band is giving away music, that music promotes the band. The music is the "advert" for the majority of bands.

More broadly, people seem to be trying to find clever ways to get round the facts of the internet - you can't.