News and Ideas from the Bleeding Edge

For years I’ve been harping on this, and slowly but surely the tide is turning.  All of the streaming song previews on efolkMusic all full-length, complete songs, always have been, always will be. When we started in 1999, I had a stock letter for responding to artists who only wanted preview “clips”, 30 or 40 second bites out of songs, for their previews.  I never liked them, never wanted them on our website.  Try my logic:

If you are a painter, and you want to sell your work, do you show prospective buyers just a corner of the picture, tell them they have to trust you about what they can’t see?  Does that corner impart the full emotional weight of the art work? Obviously not- if I’m listening to a song, just starting to get “hooked” and it stops, do you think I’m more or less likely to want to continue the relationship than if I heard a complete song?

I think MySpace figured it out pretty quickly, following our lead (don’t they all), and all your Reverbnations, etc. now offer full-length previews. The plays an artist gets through these online encounters are filling in – as much as they can- for the paucity of radio play most of us fringe artists receive.  You certainly wouldn’t want to hear yourself on the radio and have it abruptly cut off after a minute. Wouldn’t be much of a sales pitch, now would it?

Take my advice, don’t hide your light under a blanket, if you’ve got something to sing about…