Often the secret weapon in album sales is the hard work of street teams, those armies of dedicated fans who pass out flyers, bombard chat rooms and do a lot of priceless dirty work.

This being the music business, yes, some of it is dirty. A post at the Velvet Rope gives an examples. It's from Victory Records to the Hawthorne Heights street team, and it captures the label's desire to get Hawthorne Heights' new album to the top of the album chart. Here's a clip in which street teamers are encourages (wink wink) to obscure the CDs of Hawthorne Height's prime competition, Ne-Yo.

"As for Ne-yo, the name of the game is to decrease the chances of a sale here. If you were to pick up handful of Ne-yo CDs, as if you were about to buy them, but then changed your mind and didn't bother to put them back in the same place, that would work. Even though this record will be heavily stocked and you might not be able to move all the stock, just relocating a handful creates issues: Even though the store will appear to be out of stock, the computer will see it as in stock and not re-order the title once it sells down and then Ne-Yo will lose a few sales later in the week."

Is the email legitimate? Coolfer would guess yes. Nothing in the email is very outlandish, frankly. These are the kinds of things labels do to get an advantage. As for the person who wrote it, it could be Abby Valentine, director of street promotion. Here's an article about Abby and Victory's street team.

The entire email is posted after the jump.

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