Sony BMG Music Entertainment wants to give bloggers free music and video to promote on their blogs:

The music conglomerate is promoting a new site, called Musicbox Video, that showcases videos, artist interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and other material from a broad portfolio of its artists. Want to see a film clip of Bruce Springsteen singing "The River" from the 1980 movie "No Nukes" or some clips from Franz Ferdinand? The site has it.

But Sony will also actively encourage fan sites and bloggers--who are mostly used to receiving cease-and-desist letters from studios--to link to the material. Links for adding Musicbox content are displayed on the site.

Individuals thus could create sites focused around certain artists by linking to video channels on the Musicbox site dedicated to them, or link to several channels which, in the aggregate, comprise the most mawkish artists (in the view of the blogger) that Sony has to offer.

So basically someone out there finally realized that if people use their music in their videos or podcasts, and 5 million people watch or download that video or podcast, chances are good several of them will go buy said music. And as such, they effectively get free advertising with no cost whatsoever to the company, and pull in revenue with no additional effort? Why in the hell would they want that? :)