Personally, I fall into a category of people who are very annoyed by clips and want the whole song--unabridged, uncut--because otherwise, the emotional experience just doesn't happen, even if the song is great. It's not going to catch my attention if I only hear ten seconds of a hook. Thirty seconds might cut it--in fact, if it hadn't been for melodicrock.com's thirty second clips, I might never have bought Tony Harnell's "Starbreaker" album or Elevener's "When Kalleidoscopes Collide." I'm not sure if it's the webmaster/reviewer who makes the promo clips or if he simply receives them from the labels, but they generally give the best part of the song so you really know what you're getting and it really DOES catch your attention.

I will say this, though...if a song simply takes too long to develop, I lose interest in it. Having a ten-second clip of the build-up MIGHT work, but If I go to the website to listen to the whole thing and hear two minutes of verses and instrumental interludes, I won't waste my time. Unless it's Steve Reich or Philip Glass, but that's a whole other story entirely.

I'm not sure if this feedback affects your ideas at all, but I figured having another listener's perspective might help. After all, that's who you'd be targeting.

The Hypebot survey doesn't tell you much about anything, other than what artists think; a survey of 75 HypeBot readers is hardly scientific (I do love Hypebot, but the survey doesn't tell me much).. Myspace is the worst way to showcase your music. There are far better ways to feature your songs now (named above). Stay on MySpace if it helps you network with fans (which I doubt more and more each day). However, if you need to demo songs to someone in the industry, use something that loads fast and works reliably.

From Hypebot:
"...As of Wednesday morning almost 78% of Hypebot readers responding to an ongoing poll say that MySpace is still an essential part of their music social networking efforts. 26.2% say that MySpace still "rules music" and 51.6% say that using MySpace alongsaide Facebook and other sites is "essential". (Updated results may vary slightly.)"

So an artist that has 200,000 fans (not just listeners, but fans who buy something every year (a ticket, merchandise, music) should be able to gross in the $5 million range, more or less.

Wow am I embarrassed.. I could not figure out why were not on the same page. I kept using 10 billion. You were adding up to 100 billion due to my additional ZERO. Super sorry about that. I usually double check my numbers. I fixed the error. Right you are 2,000 times 50,000,000 does not equal 10 billion. Ouch.. $5,000,000 is the number.

Cheers,

Bruce

Neil Diamond ($70.5 million), Taylor Swift ($62.2 million), Michael Bublé ($59.5 million), Metallica ($56.4 million), Carrie Underwood ($54.9 million), Dave Matthews Band ($51.6 million), the Police ($51 million), Lil Wayne ($50.8 million), Tom Petty ($50.5 million) and Kid Rock ($50. 2 million).

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/01/madonna-acdc-an.html

This chart suggests that revenue for the global music industry will be $65 billion in 2009.

http://www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/Emarketer_2000428.aspx

2000 artists times $50 million each would be a total $100 billion, which would be almost twice the estimated amount of that chart and doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of other artists also making music. Or is my math off? Or is your source talking about some income not reflected in the global music industry chart? I'm really intrigued by this because I can't get the numbers to work for me.

The reason it caught my attention is that I am doing music business plans right now. Having a band that can gross $1 million a year is doing quite well. If you can show investors that kind of money, you are likely to get them to participate. If you can show them that you are running a $50 million a year company, you can talk to very serious investors. But there just aren't that many bands that do that. I suppose if you factor in the profits of all the radio stations and the clubs where those bands play, then you might hit better numbers, but everyone's piece of that pie is very small. That's the challenge. We're looking at a music industry where most companies are trying to collect pennies per artist. That's a hard model to make work.