The FTC and Us

Recently the FTC issued some new regulations that have created quite a stir in the blogging world. Basically it said:

The FTC will require that writers on the Web clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products. The commission also said advertisers featuring testimonials that claim dramatic results cannot hide behind disclaimers that the results aren't typical.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that some of the reviews of the albums on this site have been provided by either the artists in question or their publicity firm or someone else associated with the artist. Actually looking back on most of the reviews I've done so far and the truth is that the majority of these reviews have been on albums I have actually purchased. My last major review was Will Hoge's newest The Wreckage and I brought that album off of Amazon in vinyl form. Still I do have a stack of albums on the side of my desk that have been provided to me free in hopes of a review.

I understand where the FTC is coming from. Lots of sites on the internet talk about products or trips and you as the reader may think they're just talking about something they've recently experience and not have any idea that they are being paid to talk about said product or that trip they recently took. On my personal site altjiranga mitjina I've did Pay Posts, but I always went out of my way to label them as such. If I was getting paid to write about something I made sure that anyone reading the post knew such.

I'm not sure if I've stressed the fact that some of the music on this site comes from people trying to push said artists. I quess I always figured it was a given. But if not I want to make clear that I do recieve free albums and downloads from publicity firms hoping to get the word out on their artist.

Does getting a free album in the mail mean I'm going to feature them on this site or give them a good review? Of course not. If I don't like the artists' music than I'm not going to give them a good review. But you have to remember the point of this site is to help promote artists that need a little extra help, those singers and songwriters and groups that don't have a giant corporation behind them, that don't appear on the late night shows, that don't have the full page ads in the newest issue of Rolling Stone. We're trying to get the word out on these artists.

We made a promise when we started this site and if you go read our Mission statement you'll see it there:

We plan to be positive on this site. Our main goal is the weekly features that showcase a new artist. Inbetween these weekly features we’ll pass along news and tour information, maybe do some album reviews and even a concert review here and there. Our plan is to pass on the good and if we come across things we don’t like we’ll do what our Mom told us when we were kids, “if you can’t say something nice, than don’t say anything at all.”

So just because you don't see us bad mouthing an artist or giving someone's album a bad review doesn't mean we've been bought off. It just means that if we don't like someone's music we'd rather not talk about it on here.

For albums that we review that have been provided to us from an artist or their representative we'll put a disclaimer at the end of the review to let you know. But believe us when we say that it won't effect our words on the music.

But we want to point out that we couldn't do as good a job as we do without these publicists and friends of the artists providing us with their music. We seek out and find a lot of new music that gets passed by, but we've discovered a lot more with the help of these friends of the artists. We would never had discovered such great artists as Nathan Lane, Chris Smither, Nicholas Howard and so many more without the aid of such help. They provide a great help in our mission to discover new music and get the word out there about it.