Lots of artists ask us if they should give away songs as a strategy to build popularity? Our answer to this question is: if you believe it helps to give away a few songs, then you should only give away low resolution MP3s...

The digital music landscape is changing rapidly. Eventually, everyone will understand the difference between a low resolution MP3 and a high resolution MP3. The difference between a low and a high resolution MP3 is the rate in which the MP3 is encoded at. Right now, iTunes sells protected tracks that are encoded at 128 kbps. Soon, we believe iTunes will be selling every track as unprotected MP3s encoded at 256 kbps or higher.

We know consumers, and no consumer will want to have the inferior version of your song that you gave away for free. After a while, if a fan likes your song, they are going to upgrade to the higher resolution version. Moreover, higher resolution tracks are going to sound better in a room or on a car stereo, and unavoidably, this is what the industry will convince consumers.

If you want to pursue this strategy, we suggest that you put the low resolution encoding rate right into the track name of your song. For example, if your song were titled Butterfly, you would name the track 80KBPSversion-Butterfly or 128KBPSversion-Butterfly. Doing this lets your fans know that there is another version available.