Study Shows High Quality, Longer Samples improves Sales

A report to be published in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising says that longer, higher quality free music samples engage more listeners. It seems that the normal 30 seconds of most samples just don't do the job.

The problem is that 30 seconds usually doesn't hit enough of the hooks of the song (or maybe none at all) that a listener might really love. A longer sample is more likely to hit the part of the song that you want to hear over and over and therefore, buy the song.

Yanbin Tu in the Department of Marketing at Robert Morris University and Min Lu in the Department of Finance and Economics, have studied digital music samples and their survey suggests that for music samples, the most effective sample is high quality and is a longer rather than a shorter sample. "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.

The basic idea behind giving someone a sample of anything, be it a snack food or razor blades, is to provide the best experience possible to turn that person into a customer. It just goes against logic and common sense to even think about providing something of a lessor quality and expecting a sale as a result.

But this is the music industry, an industry that frequently defies common sense. It's wishful thinking to hope that this report will have any impact on business as usual. But artists can take these findings to heart and provide prospective customers with the best experience possible - as in give the whole song away for free. Surprisingly enough, the more you give away, the more you end up selling - a basic premise of Music 3.0.