Wait, wait…so you’re saying if you give me a music sample that is longer than 20 seconds and not compressed to shit, I might actually buy it? No…
Hypebot reports on a study to be published in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising that combats the conservative view that if you give too much away for free, the listener becomes a freeloader.
“Digital music samples with a higher quality and longer segments were found to increase the sampler’s music evaluation and make the evaluation process more useful,” the researchers say. Higher music evaluation then led to fewer consumers taking the music sample as a substitute for the original music. The lesson for the industry is that the current practice of offering only short, low quality samples is not ideal.
There you have it. If you give a fan a sample that barely makes it to the chorus and sounds like it was played out of a transistor radio, they’ll probably turn it off before they even have a chance to pass judgment on it.
