The problem artists face is that we're operating on a super tight budget, and popular email newsletter service prices can add up quickly. We need to extract as much value as possible out of each penny spent, and at $0.01/email for the typical service, we're going to run out of pennies fast.

So along comes a service called messagepub.com that provides not just email but also Twitter, Google Chat, AIM, text and phone messages for a fraction of the cost ($0.0015/email, and the first 5,000/month are free!). The catch is it's made for web developers. You need to know how to code to get it to do anything.

Well, I just happen to code a bit in addition to playing music. So I wrote a simple newsletter tool for my site here that sends emails through messagepub.com. I call it PubMail. You can try it out by subscribing to my newsletter if you want (johnnybroadway.com/mailing.list), and you'll even get a free song download in the welcome message for signing up :)

You can download PubMail for free (open source!) from its new home here:

http://github.com/jbroadway/pubmail

Just go to the downloads page and you'll see a zip file there. The homepage includes detailed info to help you get started, and I wrote it using PHP5 which is available on almost any shared host, so chances are you're already set up to use it, just unzip and go!

I hope other artists, bands, labels, or anyone else looking for a simple and affordable email newsletter/mailing list program will find this useful to them. If you know someone who might find this useful, please pass it along. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvements, send 'em my way!

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