Song previews in music stores have always fascinated me. I remember when I first downloaded iTunes I wondered: how is the location of the preview in the song selected? Why 30 seconds? Most importantly, why can’t the previews be better?

Thankfully, a lot of music sites I use are better, and are only improving. Trackitdown recently upgraded their player (shown to the left) so you can play the entire song. Strangely, the song stops automatically after the normal preview length of a couple minutes. If you seek to a different part of the song, the preview window shortens to 30 seconds. But if you patiently click where you left off each time it stops, you can hear the whole song.

I don’t think this is poor interface design. I think this is the result of compromise. Stores want to offer as much preview as they can (because consumers want it) but content providers (musicians, music labels, etc.) are afraid of giving away too much for free. Many iterations of “Well, what if we did this?” met with “Well… only if you limit it this way” must have led to the behaviors consumers are now familiar with.

The good news is that the music stores are making progress. Song previews have been gradually getting longer, higher quality, and more interactive with time. The Trackitdown player is a good example. Here are a couple other ones.

Above is the Beatport player. The best (relatively recent) feature of this player is the queue on the right. As with Trackitdown, everywhere in the store where a song is shown, you can either play it immediately or add it to the preview queue. It is a great experience to shop by building up a queue, then sitting back and listening to long, high quality previews while doing something else for awhile, opening up Beatport when you like the current song. All previews are a couple minutes long, but the quality varies: I wonder if different content providers have different preview fidelity restrictions.

This one is the Soundcloud player. This site isn’t really a store: it lets people pay to have high quality hosting for music in order to promote it. This site demonstrates the waveform display that is showing up in many music stores. At first it might just seem like eye-candy, but waveforms have been in DJ tools for a long time because they’re genuinely useful. If you’re previewing a song, and it breaks down to a quiet bit, you may just want to visually identify the busy part get to the point. It’s a great way to quickly triage songs if you don’t want to listen to full 2 minute previews for everything.

I expect full-song previews to show up someday, with sound quality being the only incentive to pay up. This works well for selling stock images: some sites use watermarks, but others simply provide a lower-resolution version of the image as the preview. Let’s hope the current trend continues at least: the more I know about a song, the more likely I am to feel confident enough to pay for it.