My MP3 Posting Policy

I got a few comments questioning the wisdom and ethics of posting MP3s on my blog.

I’ve been doing this at least once a week for well over a year and I’ve thought a lot about these issues and have come up with the following policy:

1 – Encode the MP3s at 64kbps so that they’ll load quickly and the songs will be listenable.  This also means that if the MP3s are downloaded, most listeners won’t find the quality acceptable enough for repeated listens.  If you listen to the MP3s on my blog, you’ll almost always hear the "swirls" that are associated with low bit rate audio.

2 – Always provide a description of the song and band and a link to a place to buy the music.  I have linked to iTunes in the past but because not everyone has the iTunes client, I’ve recently been linking to Amazon instead.  I don’t normally go to the trouble of configuring the link to compensate me via Amazon Associates for this, but if there were an easy way to do that, I would.

3 – Do not make the music play automatically.  I thought about this and decided that it would be annoying to readers.  So you have to click on the link (or the new flash player) to hear the music.  I have no idea how many readers do this.  I hope the new flash player makes it more common.

4 – Don’t post too many MP3s.  I always post a song on Mondays.  Sometimes its a new unsigned artist.  More often its a signed artist.  Those posts are always titled MP3 of the Week.  Every once in a while, I’ll post another MP3 or maybe even two during the week.

So that’s my policy.  I realize that people think its wrong to play music like this.  I don’t share that view obviously.  I believe that I am introducing my readers to music that they’ll like and the result will be more music sales.  If I felt otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it.