Here’s another helping of business wisdom received via Twitter and worth passing on. The whole thing started when I received this tweet from our old friends Hold Your Horse Is (above).

@HoldYourHorseIs:  hello sir! We’re finally releasing our album! We’ll send a copy over!

@freshnet: is album streaming somewhere we can hear it?

@HoldYourHorseIs: not streaming just yet, we’ll email you a link though. Just got couple of singles out for people to test the water!  It will be on Spotify and iTunes on the release date too.

@freshnet: At #indiecon last week @mr_trick explained how streaming the @alt_J album in full, pre-release, actually BOOSTED sales.

@samsmifff: How can this be proven?

@mr_trick: All clicks were trackable so we know how many we drove from the Soundcloud player to retail… and also the stream was the only thing happening week before release… and we know how many sales we had before and after the stream happened. There’s no end of evidence, basically – just no room to explain it all here 😉

@mr_trick: Though I should also say the reason we got a great conversion was because the album is amazing and amazing albums are easier to sell. More a case of “just listen…” At the end of the day, a crappy record won’t boost sales w/a full stream… but a great one will. I did write a litany of replies to this but frankly it warrants a proper blog post!

@mr_trick  is Darren Hemmings. By day he is the founder of Motive Unknown, a strategic digital marketing consultancy and was formerly Head of Digital Marketing for [PIAS] Entertainment Group. By night he is a sometime radio presenter, obsessive guitar collector, trainee meditator and dub junkie. http://mrtrick.net