As an indie musician, you’ve spent a lot of time pondering the most critical questions a modern musician can ask him or herself. How do I sell my music on iTunes? When did Rolling Stone become sort of lame? How do I sell music on iTunes, again? Hopefully, you’ve already enlisted SongCast’s team of music-distributing superheroes to bestow your beautiful beats to all the major sources: iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, AmazonMP3, Rhaptody, and more. And, if you’re on team SongCast, you’re well versed in all things iTunes.

But have you ever evaluated the significance of iTunes’s previews?

As consumers, most of us hold a somewhat begrudging appreciation for previews on iTunes. On one hand, you get a complimentary thirty seconds to taste the song and ensure it’s worth $0.99. Those thirty seconds are generous, and iTunes does a great job of selecting which chunk of the song you want to hear. The problem with the preview, however, comes from our inherent selfishness. The song is right there – entirely contained in your ears for thirty beautiful, fleeting seconds – and then iTunes rips it out of your clutches. You’re mentally transported back to your kindergarten classroom when Johnny Crybaby grabbed the magic market out of your chubby little fist, completely ruining the cow you were drawing.

As the artist, your job is to harness the egoistic kid in your audience members.  As the preview ends, you want your fans to internally shriek, “MINE!” in their most childlike timbre; you want them to snatch back the magic marker. All a fan needs to do to reclaim your song from iTunes is click a polished little button, and the song is all theirs.

Those thirty seconds are your audition to your fan base, the make-or-break moment when you’re closest to selling music on iTunes.  So stop wondering “how do I sell my music on iTunes?” Join SongCast, and don’t underestimate the preview.