Evaluating music for purchase

This is a subject that I'm sure will get people stirred up. How do you evaluate music for purchase? What makes you buy albums as opposed to single songs? What makes you buy anything, as opposed to streaming it? Of course, the answer in for this questions boils down to just one thing:

(Photo by c_ambler, CC 2.0)

When I evaluate music, I won't purchase it until I've listened to the entire song, usually multiple times. A number of artists don't seem to like it when people put their music on YouTube for people to listen to whole songs, but I feel that's been a necessity for me to find out about a lot of the bands that I'm into now and evaluate songs and albums for purchase. I'm firmly of the opinion that if you like a song, you should support the artist and buy it, but I don't feel like the ways that many artists give us to make that decision are terribly useful.

For instance, hearing a short preview for a song isn't going to give you any emotional investment in a song. You'll hear thirty seconds of it, but a song isn't like, say, food. With food, you can have a small sample and your body creates emotions quickly. You (usually) know right away whether or not you like what you're eating. With a song, on the other hand, it's not nearly so simple. Once in a while, a sample may pop up that has epic levels of innate beauty, but rarely is a disjointed sample from a cohesive whole going to give you an adequate understanding of what the song is about. Samples are good for two things:

1. It's a lot easier to tell from a sample whether or not you're going to dislike something. You may not be able to decide easily whether you're going to definitively buy something from a sample, but you'll know for sure if you're turned off by it to the point that you won't consider buying it. Hearing something nice won't necessarily bring you to buying a song, but hearing something you don't quite like will probably make you not buy it.

2. It helps you to determine authenticity on major music selling websites. Often, someone will come in with a cover of a song and be intentionally misleading about that. You can tell from the sample whether the music is actually from the artist you think, usually by hearing the singing in the sample. (Protip: If you're on a major music selling site, listening to samples of songs that aren't instrumentals, and you don't hear any singing, be very suspicious.)

So, you need to listen to the whole song. Some may say that there is always Pandora and other online radio sites like it. The problem with that is the level of randomness involved. You could be listening to Pandora all week and not get a good understanding of an album (or even a song). If you're anything like me, you can't just listen to a song once and make an immediate decision to purchase. You may need to listen to a song four or five times before deciding that a song is worth your money.

"But it's only 99 cents! Why should it matter?"

If you only intend to purchase one song, ever, or one song every once in a great while, that argument holds some merit. If a person is going to be miserly over a single dollar, then that person probably shouldn't be buying music in the first place. The problem lies in the fact that it's not a single dollar. For people who consume and purchase music regularly, those dollars add up. For example, if someone were to purchase, on average, one song a day that turns out to be a throwaway, that means about $362 would get wasted per year. There might not be a lot of things I can do with a dollar, but there are plenty of things I can do with $362. Even if it's every other day, it would still be $181. If it's only once a week that you make such a mistake, it's still over $50. That's why being able to sufficiently evaluate music matters. Adopting that philosophy doesn't cause the consumer to lose out on a single dollar, but rather drastically more.

This is why I defend the YouTube uploaders. I don't feel that artists usually give us good means of deciding our purchasing decisions. There may be a few that offer significant amounts of streaming or put up a lot of videos of their own, but usually, you get maybe one or two music videos per album (and sometimes, they want you to pay for the music videos) and virtually no streaming. I'm not going to buy a song, let alone an entire album, just because someone tells me it's great. I've had way too many people sing praises for music, only for me to think quite differently.

What would make me happy would be if artists put all or a significant portion of their music on YouTube. Obviously, I can understand not wanting the music to be in purchasing grade (320 bitrate for MP3s), but if you could hear the songs at an adequate quality before purchase, like 128 or 192 bitrate, you can make a fair decision on purchase. I won't lie and say there won't be people who will abuse the system, but I think there will be a lot of people who will also be very happy and be more willing to purchase music, too, because they've been able to level the information disparity within the transaction. Those people who abuse the system are probably not customers artists will be brokenhearted about losing, anyway.

All in all, I think the important take-home message here is that artists and record companies need to come up with better ways for customers to make informed decisions about how they buy music. I think that will help to bring in more new business as well as make current customers more loyal to the brands.