D-Blog to iTunes:

Hi there. Of course I love iTunes, but I have one special request for purchasing music.

Sometimes the 30 second clip you provide as a free sample is not enough to know if you want to buy the song. This is especially true in longer classical pieces (sometimes 8 or 9 minutes) where you may hear the introduction but not how the orchestra plays the main melodies later in the piece.

If you are a professional musician, say a clarinetist, who is studying the piece, the clip may not contain the big clarinet solo you're looking for. So either you wind up buying a lot of recordings you don't need or you wind up not buying any.

My solution to this would be to give the option of buying a one-time listen to any song/movement for a discounted price, say 10 or 15 cents. There could be something in the legal agreement saying that a charge for under 25 cents would not need to be authorized, so you could just click on the option to charge a dime to your account and get to listen to the song all the way through- but just once. Then if you chose to buy it, iTunes could charge the remaining 89 cents to your account. Easy.

There have been at least a dozen occasions where I have not bought recordings from you guys because I didn't get a good enough idea of the piece from the 30 second clip provided. Can you imagine buying Bohemian Rhapsody from a thirty second clip from the heavy metal segment of the song? You wouldn't even know what you were getting. Same for a lot of the late Beatles stuff and most classical music compositions which have many segments in them and all kinds of details that different instrumentalists and singers would want to pick out.

I hope you find my solution both feasible and intelligent and that you are able to implement it without too much difficulty (and that you offer me a percentage of the profits you will undoubtedly make from my idea!).

Thanks very much for listening and for a terrific product.

Sincerely,
[D-Blog]