Partial-song Previews, RIP, Please!
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…