Perhaps the labels weren’t deaf. Perhaps the labels are increasingly feeling pressured to meet the public’s demands as music sales decrease. Buying music should be like going to Costco or Trader Joe’s. You walk around, browse the aisles, and come across a sample station to taste morsels of curried chicken, seasoned fries or sliced herb sausage in little paper cups. 90% of the time you really enjoy your sample of food, and end up putting a box or two of the food item you had just sampled in your shopping cart, anxious to eat it at home. This concept needs to be applied to music as well. Although iTunes does offer 30-second clips of the music that you are browsing around for, 30-second clips don’t sound like the entire song. You can’t hear the intro, the verses, the solos, etc...iTunes usually features the clip at the choral parts of the song. This poses a problem for music buyers who become reluctant to purchasing music from iTunes based on a 30-second sample. Let’s face it: music buyers need the whole sample…they need to try the entire song/album before they buy it.
Thankfully, according to NMA.co.uk, a news article by Alex Farber, titled, “Warner and V2 to offer 'try before you buy' download service” may be answering our prayers. Warner and V2 records have agreed to use the try before you buy feature on an online service. “Warner Music and V2 have today agreed to take up eListening Post's viral channel as a way to sell more digital downloads.” These guys are way behind in the race. MySpace has been doing just this for years, exposing users and non users to full-length songs of every artist imaginable. MySpace allowed for fast streaming, making its music player champion among windows media player and quicktime. It's speed and accessibility put others to shame and gave listeners more incentive to hear more artists, in more time, creating MORE fans. It's still hard to believe that some labels out there are having a hard time putting up more songs for listeners to enjoy through MySpace, in fears that they might lose money, or give away "too much" of a song. The real problem is that they disadvantage themselves for limiting material on the web and their Myspace profiles. But with eListening Post's viral channel listeners are aloud up to 5 full listens before purchasing a song. Although music fans are able to listen to full clips of music for free on MySpace, its selection of songs is very limited...then again MySpace does not limited the number of times you can play a song! It’s not yet confirmed if the music players for try and buys allow for rewind, pause and forward features, but it’s another step towards a changing industry as DRM is slowly diminishing. The original aim of the service is to spark interest in a song, hopefully causing listeners to pass the songs on to their friend to try it out too.
The article can be viewed at : http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/32550/Warner+and+V2+to+offer+
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