Can You Dig It? Emporer X Buries New Songs Around L.A. For Fans To Find

Singer-songwriter Chad Matheny has been recording albums under the name Emperor X for years. He's gotten a little attention, but certainly not broken through to anything close to mainstream success. Now Matheny's started burying his new songs in the ground and giving fans clues as to how to find them.

Recently, Matheny walked to a rock near L.A. dropped to his knees and started scratching at the dirt.  "Ha, there it is," he told the NPR reporter accompanying him. "So if someone just casually comes up to the rock, they won't notice anything, but down a half-inch, it's right there."  Soon Matheny plans to post the tape's GPS coordinates on his website for a fan to go dig it up.

The fan that finds it it gets to keep the tape along with a secret code that unlocks more music for the rest of the world to hear. Each song is just a half-form idea according to Matheny: "That's what I'm doing when I bury these things. I bury the whole creative process and leaving it out there if they want it. People don't usually get to hear that."

"This highlights, once again, that the idea behind these actions aren't that everyone should do it this way, but that each artist needs to come up with ideas that really fit with the type of artist they are," said Mike Masnick of Techdirt. "Something like this really appears to fit with Matheny and the fans of Emperor X, so it works for him. Other artists need to figure out what works for them as well. "