If you make a thread at a popular forum about a new album and say really good stuff about it, pretending to be a fan, really trying to convince them to buy it and say there is a sale at amazon and post your ref/aff link is that a good idea? or another idea i have: my cousin used to have a popular youtube channel, one video was a leaked track from a 50 cent album and it got 800,000 views in less than a week, if he put an amazon affiliate link to buy/preorder the album in video description he probably would of made alot of money right!?
Most forums have policies regarding affiliate links and do not allow affiliate links in posts, and I suspect the same goes for YouTube. You can TRY, but I suspect you will quickly get kicked off any forums you try to do that on!
If you could provide something constructive in a post, not advertising, and provide a link to some content or informative article on your own website that in turn provides a link to the album, you stand a better chance of not getting kicked off the forums. Even this could be a little risky, but it wouldn't be so obvious.
Well, in the end it turns out that the best way is to be a valuable member of the forum who makes a genuine contribution and in doing so raises his/her own profile, meets people, networks, gets backlinks, gets his signature link around etc. etc. So we conclude that there may be some quick, short-term ways to promote your site/affiliate program, but it's the long-term hard work that will really produce the results. Which is what we knew all along...