Sean Brennan wrote:
Partial songs on YouTube is alright for promotion (but still a violation of their TOS). Maybe just half the song. If they were partial songs that linked to the band on iTunes, the official website, also disabled comments and directed people to the official forum and mailing list, etc, then I would have no complaints. The problem is people upload full songs and then use it like a radio, they don't link to official sites or places to buy the music, and the bands suffer.

About fan support to radio and magazines, etc- it's about creating awareness. If magazines and radio kept getting requests for a particular band, eventually they may take notice. But it actually does work, too, providing enough people do this. The problem is people don't act in any way.

Sean
I agree that it gets taken too far when I see some bands' entire albums being fully uploaded onto youtube. I would assume it's a combination of people wanting to upload full songs for people to hear, and probably, because I don't think these people necessarily have the knowledge of how to make their own edits, to make short samples. There's free audio-editing programs like Audacity but that might be complex (or "too much effort" to understand) for the average person.

I think the best thing might be for you to make a sampler for each album, and you could supply website links, or additional information to promote LAM. Perhaps too if you have live peformance/backstage or general band footage you could use than in the background, because I think when people see a moving images or something "flashy", it's more effective when people just post a song with a picture of the band/album cover. Like, the video for "Kiss" I think is very effective, and the trailer for VAOB was pretty cool! I'm not sure if there's any LAM samplers or anything already on youtube but I think that might be a good idea. Like I said, when I recommend LAM I'll usually give people a youtube link to a song or two. With a sampler, they might be able to pick out something they particularly like from a variety of songs and they might also realize the entire album is good and worth buying. Also, if comments were allowed, it might prompt people to discuss the album, rather than simply comment on how much they like a particular song. I'm not sure if it would be guaranteed to help, but I don't think there's any harm in trying it.