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My brain hurts.A lot. A few months back, I started StereoType Records with some like minded friends. We had a good concept, great music and a sound business plan. We would all contribute to the music, Lee would run the business side, Ebrahim would run the studio, Chad would run operations and I would tap into my marketing genius to come up with unique, innovative and astounding ideas. Easy, right? Maybe not so much...

For the last few weeks we've been planning our label media launch, all learning valuable lessons about business, PR and event organization along the way. One of my responsibilities is to put together the media pack that the press will receive on arrival at the event. Said gift pack would contain the relevant biographies, data and music that the journos could consume on their own time. This one task has come to consume, agitate and infuriate me endlessly over these past weeks. It started with the obvious - scanning trade magazine and gift catalogues for 'the usuals' to see if there was anything that I might find useful. No luck there. After staring at the 100th keyring and the 50th mousepad, I still have no ideas. At one point this afternoon I really was tempted to say 'screw it' and just get some super shiny keyrings, chuck them in the pack and let that be that. But I know that I would never let myself live it down.

My Friday afternoon deadline is looming and racing ever closer and I now dread having to report back to the team that I have diddly squat for them. You see, the problem with everything out there is that it's been done so many times before. I have more business card holders that I know what to do with and enough pens to write War and Peace in at least three differetnt languages.

What I need is something relevant to our business (music production and distribution), has some 'legs' and will be featured or at least seen long after the event and most importantly, isn't down right boring.

I read somewhere that simplicity is 'subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful'. And try as I might, I cannot seem to perform that arduously simple task.

Maybe the answer will come to me in a dream. It just might, so maybe I should get some sleep.