Limited Edition. Two words that inspire a collectors lust for ownership of the rarest items. These pressings aren’t always easy to find and even knowing about them in time to have a chance to buy is difficult. Some are so underground you have to be connected to a select group of people to learn about them while others are announced via email, Twitter or Facebook. Finding information as it’s announced is the only way to increase the likelihood of ownership. There are a few tools you can use to funnel announcements into a single stream of music updates some of which you’re already familiar with.

Decisions First

Social media and email can be overwhelming and as a consequence of gathering information from freely available tools you are subjecting yourself to digital overload. The solution? An alternate email address. Create an account from any of the popular choices, gmail or yahoo and use it as a filter to capture any information you are forced to signup for. I suggest this because let’s face it, your email address is valuable to marketers, and once you fill out a form – any form on the internet – you agree to receive emails from that company and possibly it’s affiliates. Routing all of these emails into a centralized location dissociated from your personal email account means less junk to sort through on a daily basis and a cleaner inbox for the stuff that’s probably more important.

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

Labels and Bands leverage social media in different ways, so following any feed attached to a band, artist, retailer or label provides the highest opportunity to learn about happenings and releases. Most social media sites make finding people to follow that are relevant to your tastes pretty painless based on suggestion engines, all you need to do is start liking or following anything to prompt further opportunity. Diversify your approach by casting the widest net and capturing the most information, then sort through the bylines to glean out the important stuff.

Information Automation

The next level of information collection is all about automation. With just a little bit of setup, you can program specific search terms to trigger events that will notify you of activity related to your criteria. Pipes, from Yahoo, is a great example of building channels that funnel information into configurable formats like RSS or even text alerts. Google Alerts is a similar service. Both Yahoo and Google offer large knowledgebases so learning how to use these tools is not as hard as it sounds or looks. Unofficial tutorials and videos litter the Internet and YouTube as well. Everybody’s doing it.

Follow Everything

In the beginning, follow everything. After a few weeks, the feeds that generate the best content or that most relevant to you are going to surface. Now your information network is a curated feed of awesome.