How to send someone a private demo
Emailing a WAV to a label, a collaborator or a friend, without it bouncing, expiring, demanding they make an account, or quietly ending up somewhere you did not put it.
What the listener actually needs
Almost every problem here comes from optimising for the sender. The person receiving it has a narrower set of needs, and they are worth stating plainly: press play, hear the song, on whatever device is in their hand. Anything else you ask of them is a chance for them not to bother.
Which rules out more than you would think. A download is a request to manage a file. An account is a request to sign up. An app is a request to install something. Each is a small ask, and each one loses some fraction of the people you sent it to — often the busiest ones, whose opinion you wanted most.
The usual options, honestly
Everything here works. They fail differently, and the failures are predictable.
- Email attachment
- Bounces above about 25 MB, which is a four-minute WAV. Fine for an MP3 to a friend, useless for anything lossless.
- Dropbox or Google Drive
- Reliable and universal, but it hands over a file rather than a song — most people get a download and a permissions prompt, and some get asked to sign in. Sharing settings are also easy to get wrong in the direction of too open.
- WeTransfer
- No account for the recipient, which is the right instinct. It expires, though, so a link in a month-old email thread is dead exactly when someone circles back to it.
- SoundCloud private links
- Plays in a browser, no account needed, genuinely good at this. It is a platform rather than a private channel — the track lives in your public-facing account, and the audio is transcoded, so it is not what you want for a mastering check.
- A private link that just plays
- What most people actually want: a page that opens and plays, no login, that you can switch off later. This is the category Sonic Station's tape links are in.
Revocable beats secret
An unguessable link is not a secret. It is a token you have handed to someone, and it can be forwarded, pasted into a group chat, or left in an email that gets read by someone else years later. Treat it as something that will eventually travel.
The protection that actually holds is being able to turn it off. If a link can be revoked, a leak is an inconvenience; if it cannot, a leak is permanent. When you are sending an unreleased record to anyone you do not know well, revocability is the feature to check for.
For the highest-stakes sends — a sync brief, an unreleased master, a label you have not met — a link that plays once and then stops is stronger still. They can hear it; they cannot sit on a copy.
Send the right file
Send a lossless file when the person is going to work on it — a mastering engineer, a mixer, a collaborator who needs the stems' sibling. Send an MP3 or its equivalent when the person is going to listen to it and have an opinion, which is nearly always.
A 320 kbps MP3 is not the reason your demo gets passed on. Making someone wait ninety seconds for a 60 MB download on a train might be.
Common questions
- How do I send a demo without the person needing an account?
- Use a link that plays in a browser rather than a file that downloads. Email attachments bounce above ~25 MB, and cloud drives usually hand over a download and sometimes a sign-in prompt; a plain private link that opens and plays asks nothing of the listener.
- Can I stop someone re-sharing a demo link?
- Not reliably — assume any link you send will eventually travel. What protects you is being able to revoke it, so a leak becomes an inconvenience rather than something permanent. For unreleased material, a link that plays once is stronger again.
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