Your Best Stuff

March 27, 2006 ·  

Seth Godin writes a blog that I enjoy very much because it makes me think. I like to think.

In a recent post titled “Your Best Stuff” he talks about the irony of those “free music cd’s.” Often times, big bands are able to put just one song on the cd and they are faced with a dilemma. What song do you put on?

He goes one to write, “If it’s your best song, and it’s free, then no one will pay to get it from iTunes. And if it’s the best song on the album, maybe no one will buy the album since they already have the song. It’s easy to argue that you should hold back the best song, make people pay for that.”

The problem is that this may be someone’s first time hearing the band. If it’s not a good song, they skip right thru it and never become a paying customer anyway.

This applies to so many things. For instance, I just changed all the RSS feeds that I am in charge of to be the full text instead of just a teaser. Let your readers visit your site because your content is valuable and conversation inducing, not because you tease them there.

There is too much good information out there and if you don’t provide your best stuff up front, then readers (and customers) will find it elsewhere.

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Comments

One Response to “Your Best Stuff”

  1. Sea on April 5th, 2006 6:30 pm

    I worked for a small record label during high school and this dilemna was very much an issue for all the bands we worked with. I helped put together label samplers and we had to help the badns choose which song to put on them. it was always a big headache to get bands to decide.

    After a while of doing them, we decide that it was best to put a band’s catchiest song on the compilation. Catchiest doesn’t necessarily mean best. It means most likely to draw the listener in through a casual listen. If bands put their catchiest song on, the listener is more likely to go out and purchase the cd and spend more time listening to it since they paid for it. A bands best work is usually not their catchiest, but if a band teases listeners with their catchiest, they have a much better chance at getting their best work in fron of the listeners ear.

    Just a thought from my experience.

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