Death by promo

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Over the past week, I downloaded most of the promos and demos in my inbox. Now my computer desktop looks like this. I still have over 150 unanswered emails to go. These days, individual emails often contain multiple promos, as publicists and labels promote batches of releases.

Each zipped folder is one release. My desktop has 168 of them. In my “Projects” folder at the upper right, I have an “Albums to process” subfolder (albums like those on my desktop: downloaded but unheard) that holds over 16 GB of releases. Elsewhere on my computer I have a folder of releases I’ve “processed” – that is, I’ve heard them, kept them for consideration, and cleaned up their MP3 tags. That folder is over 22 GB in size.

If each GB is about 10 releases (a conservative number, since promos often come at inferior bitrates and thus smaller sizes), and if I include the physical CD promos I’ve gotten, which stack up over a meter high, I easily have over 600 promos and demos in my listening queue.

This is a first world problem, I realize. I’m not complaining about getting free stuff so much as my inability to process it. I suppose mass deletion is one solution – and I’ve done that before with promos at 192kbps or below – but I try to listen to everything I get. I still believe in the hidden gem. With so much information clogging up the world, musical gems are more likely to stay hidden. So I feel it’s more important than ever to try to uncover them – even if doing so requires digging through mountains of digital shit.

So if you’re a band or label, and you’ve sent me music, and it’s taking forever for a review to appear – well, this is what you’re up against.

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