Mercy Lounge announced today they’ve launched a new initiative along with State Farm Insurance to, ideally, expose some local artists to a wider audience through an exclusive mailing list that provides you with a monthly mixtape of new, downloadable, goods. The basic gist, you provide them with your email, they provide you with a password to 10-14 tracks of quality music; playable in your favorite browser or downloadable to your machine. It’s a bit weird to have State Farm Insurance so closely tied in with a bunch of local bands but it falls right in line with the Art vs Content debate that’s been going on for awhile now – the corporate entity associated with the music doesn’t matter so much as long as they aren’t directly influencing the art, right?

Regardless of that whole situation – it is a good way to keep up with local music. This month’s inaugural edition has music from the likes of How I Became the Bomb, And The Relatives, Diarrhea Planet, PUJOL and a host of others. Well worth the email swap.