If you've got a good product and you go and talk to the right people about it, some percentage (hopefully much larger than 1%) will end up buying it. If you just send spam to a billion people, however, chances are hardly anyone will buy it.
Advertising is spam. Sales is not spam. Giving out CDs as a promotion at an event where you're present, where people can see you, is not a faceless marketing attempt to get that "1%" effect.
Finally, the advice in the previous article was intended to make an immediate difference to the band's receipts and, iirc, it did. The fact that some percentage of those who bought the donationware CDs also brought more friends along the next time the band visited was only a nice side-effect.
* A marketing mechanism can have very poor, even zero, results.
* There exists a marketing mechanism for bands (giving away product) which is effective in promoting the brand.
It's not clear how stating that a particular marketing mechanism works, but that marketing mechanisms in general can have low to zero returns, are contradictory concepts.
Even factoring the cost of the media into the ticket sale can encourage people to come see your show.
You were confident there that telling the audience how much the CD mattered to the band would increase sales and future popularity, to the point that in the comment section you repeatedly waved aside people's worries about the short-term financial risk for the band. Now here's a blog post less than a week later saying 'investing money in putting yourself out there and planning for success? what a maroon.'
I can believe that maybe the guy's ad sucked, and he'd have been far better off booking more gigs and passing the hat around, but c'mon Mr Sivers, you promote optimistic marketing strategies as much as anybody out there.