Windows Media Guide!

There has been no shortage of talk surrounding the Sponsored Songs Program, an experiment brought to you by Reverbnation, Microsoft Windows, and 1001 bands, known and unknown, local and not local. The program is in it's final few weeks, and from our end, we can honestly say that the vast majority of people who downloaded our song have been people that we have sent to the download site. This means we asked friends to help us out and they did (thank you friends!). It also means that there weren't very many people who happened upon our music and downloaded it.

Such is the nature of experiments. The downside is that a lot of the time you don't get the outcomes you hope for. The upside is that you learn as much if not more from the let downs than you do from the successes. This is how we got post-it notes and teflon. So while any bump we saw with RN from the program was short lived and somewhat artificial, it opened the door for new ideas.

A few weeks ago we got an email from Jed Carlson at Revebnation. They asked us if we'd like to submit our sponsored song to Windows for inclusion at the Windows Media Guide website. The terms wouldn't change from the sponsored songs thingy. No new money, but potential exposure. We submitted our song thinking that we could see how it would affect the numbers we (I) had been watching for a few months.

I don't know how many bands submitted, but we were chosen, and Microsoft has been featuring us at their media guide for just about the past week. We mentioned the inclusion on facebook and twitter but we didn't push it nearly as hard as we had the original sponsored song since all of our friends had already downloaded it, and we really wanted to see what kind of attention it would bring from the outside.

Feel free to take a look at the site. Hit up the media guide, mouse over "music" and select "free downloads". Or just click here. It's an old song, nothing you haven't heard before if you've been listening to us for the past few years. But it's an interesting idea. We will report back when it's all done and let you know how well it worked.

Requests for a free copy of Windows 7 as compensation have gone unreplied.