Interesting discussion. I know I have posted my thoughts on this before, but I will again ... I cannot begin to assess the quality of a CD by listening to clips, period. Part of it is that I'm a big prog rock fan, so if I listen to 30-60 seconds of a 7-minute song, it really tells me absolutely nothing about the quality of that piece. I miss the good old days when Andrew used to post full songs from CDs to download and listen to. My strategy in those days was to download it, put it on an iTunes playlist, and listen to it several times. If that song worked for me, I had no problem with buying the whole CD and did. But to listen to short clips of a song or even all of them on a CD doesn't do it for me and I know I'm definitely less likely to buy the album. Even putting a Youtube link doesn't help much because the sound quality is so bad there that I can't feel the true vibe of the song. Just my two (ten?) cents worth ...