When a 62-year-old man drinks a beer, it doesn’t usually make news. When the man happens to be Bruce Springsteen — well, just watch and tell me this isn’t one of the coolest concert moments ever.

Bruce Springsteen has a new album coming out March 6, and the way it’s being marketed is really smart.

Starting February 20 and continuing through March 2, 10 of the album’s 11 songs will be streaming daily, one song per day, on partner sites like Rolling Stone, Spin and Paste. The 11th song and the opening track, “We Take Care of Our Own,” was released January 19.

For a complete rundown of sites and links–and more Springsteen news than you can handle–check out Backstreets. The sites and links rundown, including which song is streaming on which day, is in the February 20 post.

It’s a smart strategy for a number of reasons, mainly because it’s tapping into the online audiences of 10 major music sites. Sure, the entire album is being offered essentially for free, but to get it all you have to be pretty tech-savvy in order to capture the streams. (Plus it would be a lot easier to just tap into the leak of the album that happened earlier this week.)

Meanwhile, awareness and word of mouth is growing significantly on a record that is, from what I’ve heard so far, is as powerful and thematically cohesive a set of songs, both lyrically and musically, as anything he’s ever done.

So yeah, Springsteen’s giving away the whole deal. So what? My prediction is that Wrecking Ball will get a ton of five-star reviews and will be one of the top-sellers of 2012, in no small part because of this marketing strategy.

Bruuuuuuuuce!

“This train
Carries saints and sinners
This train
Carries losers and winners
This train
Carries whores and gamblers
This train
Carries lost souls
This train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This train
Faith will be rewarded
This train
Hear the steel wheels singin’
This train
Bells of freedom ringin’
This train
Carries broken-hearted
This train
Thieves and sweet souls departed
This train
Carries fools and kings
This train
All aboard.”
—Bruce Springsteen (turns 62 today)

“There’s a blood red circle
On the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church door’s thrown open
I can hear the organ’s song
But the congregation’s gone”
—Bruce Springsteen

Here’s a nifty little trick regarding thumbnail images on Facebook you may find interesting.

Let’s say you’re adding a link to a message you’re posting on someone’s wall. In the case above, I’m adding www.brucespringsteen.net to my status. Facebook gives me the option of choosing 1 of 9 thumbnails to go with the link. The thumbnails correspond to images that appear on that page.

Pretty simple, right? But let’s say you’re the owner of the page in question and, for whatever reason, you want to give me 10 choices and not 9 … and you want to do so without adding another image to the page.

Here’s what you do: Add the extra photo to the page, but program it to display at 0 x 0 pixels. The image won’t appear on your page, but it will appear as a thumbnail option on Facebook.

What’s the practical application for such a trick? I can’t think of many, but I can imagine some sort of “share this page on Facebook and use the secret thumbnail” activity that, if properly presented, could be interesting. There are probably a few others, but I haven’t thought about it all that deeply.

It would be cool, though, if Facebook would allow page owners to specify one thumbnail to go with the page in question; you can do that with thumbnails relative to the Like button (this page explains how), but as far as I know not with pasting a URL into a message.