Influx

Brands are leveraging their market research capabilities, along with some outsourced street savvy, to find and link up with unsigned, future-star musicians. The brands then release the songs in ads or on branded CDs and go along for the ride as the artist breaks onto the scene. It’s far less expensive than licensing an existing hit because unsigned musicians want the publicity, and there’s the potential for much more street-credible exposure for the brand within the target subcultures.
Read the Guardian article

The obvious problem is how to find these underground talents and, once you’ve found them, how to be sure that they have the right kind of credibility with the right kind of consumer to benefit the brand.

On the streets, you may have passed stands where vendors sell pirated CDs. Often, these are not simply CD copies of published albums but are actually compilations called “mix tapes,” containing the freshest material and remixes by local and underground musicians and DJs. Frequently these vendors are competing with each other to integrate the latest songs and artists, right when they begin to become popular.
Read the article entitled, “Is it piracy or a hit pipeline?”

Musicecosystem.com mines the peer-to-peer download data and provides up-to-the-minute reports on which songs are being downloaded most in different geographic areas. It is an excellent resource if trying to monitor a signed or unsigned musician’s immediate popularity.
http://www.musicecosystem.com/toptracks.php
http://www.bigchampagne.com/