One day, I praise The Offspring -- whose music I loathe -- for their smart internet marketing tactics. The very next day, Barenaked Ladies -- yet another band that I hate -- announce their own internet "marketing" strategy, and it may be the stupidest music-related thing that I've heard this year. Well, it serves me right on a few counts, 1) for saying so many nice things about a crap band (The Offspring), 2) for forgetting to include BNL on the "Stooopid 2001" compilation ("Enid" would have been a cinch), 3) for writing about music for more than two years and until this moment, NEVER written anything about BNL, despite the fact that when I was a hardcore CFNY fan in 1989-1990, I was forced to hear songs from their 1990 indie cassette for what seemed like an hourly basis, and being too shy and unopinionated back then to stand on a table in the cafeteria in my high school at the peak of lunch hour and scream in my loudest voice (which is pretty damn loud, let me tell you) "Barenaked Ladies SUUUUUCKKKK!!!!!!" back in the days when people thought that "If I Had $1000000" was the funniest thing since Monty Python, oh but I could have stopped their meteoric rise back then because I KNEW that BNL belonged in the Supreme Hall of Fame of Universal Suckdom and I didn't tell everyone about it, oh the guilt.

So here it is. BNL are posting songs from their new album on the internet. Except that you can't actually download a complete song, you get a snippet of a song followed by the voices of Stephen Page and Tyler Stewart engaging in some light comedy banter about how what you are hearing is actually NOT a complete song but merely an advertisement for their new album, complete with silly jokes about trying to get their songs onto Napster and how tricky we Canadians are. These "Trojan Files", presumably, are intended as statements against widespread sharing of mp3 files across the internet, a process known to some greedy industry types as "piracy".

However, the band and their management believe that the Trojan files will also serve as dangling carrots, giving their fans a snippet of what to expect when they flock to the closest music shop to buy the actual CD. Except that these files are likely to PISS OFF THEIR FAN BASE more than anything else, which can't be an effective ad campaign, methinks. At the very worst, this can be viewed as the opposite of file-swapping -- BNL are holding their songs hostage, and are antagonizing their fans into paying a ransom at the closest HMV. Imagine watching the season opener of "Friends" and after the first five minutes, it cuts away to Jennifer Aniston in the NBC studios wearing a low cut top and she says "We hope you've enjoyed the first five minutes of 'Friends'. If you'd like to see the remainder of our exciting season opener, please call your local cable company. Oh yes, have your credit cards ready because that will be $15.99". No matter how much cleavage she was showing, or how many times she tossed her long tresses, it would ANNOY THE HELL OUT OF ME. Similarly, if I was a BNL fan I wouldn't need to be goaded into buying their album and if I were a potential new fan I'd think they were a bunch of Canuck arseholes and wouldn't think twice about buying their new CD, particularly when every band and their monkey's uncle, from Smashing Pumpkins to Blur ,is giving away entire songs and albums for free. No matter -- if BNL want to humiliate themselves in front of a potential internet audience of millions then I'm not going to stop them.