Please allow Tom to introduce his new show...

It's never been easy for up and coming musicians to get heard. Record companies can only sign a fraction of the available talent, and radio stations can only play a fraction of the records they release. There simply aren't enough hours in the day - at 6 Music we get sent hundreds of CDs every week, more than anyone could possibly listen to, let alone play. And many are from record company pluggers - whose sole job is to get their product played on the radio. The competition is ferocious.

Since the odds are stacked against independent artists to start with, packaging up hundreds of silver disks and mailing them out to radio stations is an expensive and inefficient way to promote their music. Not to mention an appalling waste of resources.

New songs of course are the most precious resource of all. So how come hungry young bands are making their best tunes available on social networking sites for all the world to hear? With over half a million plays on MySpace, the award-winning hip-hop artist Akala has an interesting answer.

Fans, he says, are using his page "as a radio station". Those 600,000 clicks represent - not lost income - but airplay, which his succcess as an independent artist seems to bear out. Sites like Bebo, Facebook & MySpace are great levellers: all you have to be is good and the audience will beat a path to your portal.

This gave me an idea for the BBC's "Introducing" strand. For one show let's bypass CDs, pluggers and record companies and play new tunes by unknown artists as heard on their own web pages.  The sound quality might not be the same as compact disc, but so what. Even the nation's premier pop station Radio One went out in mono on medium wave until 1994. If sound quality had been a consideration, punk rock would never have happened.

What really matters is the quality of the songwriting. Much as I like the idea of playing music straight from the coal face, there's an awful lot of dross out there in unsigned cyberspace. So for quality control we'd need to depend heavily on tips from 6 Music listeners - generally a discerning bunch - and have a dedicated web page to automate the submission process. After every show our tracklisting could link back to the pages where each song came from: listeners would find bands, bands would find listeners.

My new "Introducing" show starts at midnight this Saturday night. Ladies and Gentlemen - your recommendations please...