iTunes to Stream 90-Second Samples; Why No Full Songs?
Apple says it will triple the length of song previews in iTunes from 30 to 90 seconds. With 90-second clips, iTunes song samples should at least be long enough to hear a chorus and verse. Digital music distributor Symphonic Distribution broke the news on Tuesday via its blog, and CNet later confirmed. Apple sent a letter out to record labels, informing them that song sample length times will increase for songs over two minutes and 30 seconds long. All labels are required to do is continue to make their content available on the iTunes Store, which will signal their acceptance of the terms (if labels don’t want to participate, they can always leave, which they of course will not because iTunes is huge). Longer song samples are great, but the real question is this: why won’t Apple let people listen to entire songs on a trial basis? After all, Google and Bing already stream individual songs when you search for them by name, and MySpace lets you create playlists of streaming music. I can th
