Sending Your Band's Demo: The MP3 Specs Venues, Blogs, and A&Rs Want

The person you are sending your demo to — the venue booker, the blog editor, the label A&R — will decide whether to listen within about ten seconds of opening your message. Not ten seconds of the song: ten seconds of friction. A WeTransfer link to 400 MB of WAV files, a ZIP that needs unpacking, tracks named final_mix_v3_MASTER2.wav — each one is a reason to come back later, and later never comes. Bands obsess over the mix and then lose the listen at the file level. This guide covers the specs, sizes, and naming that get demos played.

The prime directive: zero friction

People who receive demos receive dozens per week and owe you nothing. Every step between "opens email" and "hears music" loses a percentage of them. The format that minimizes friction has been stable for years: streaming link first, MP3 attachment as backup, never a lossless archive. A private SoundCloud or streaming link plays in one click inside the email. An attached MP3 works when the recipient is offline or forwards your email to someone else. A folder of WAVs signals that you have never been on the receiving end of a demo inbox.

The MP3 spec that sounds right and travels light

• Bitrate: 320 kbps. This is music, not speech — use the top of the MP3 range. At 320 kbps a four-minute track is roughly 9–10 MB, and no listener on any playback system will flag encoding quality as an issue. Encode from your WAV or AIFF masters with a WAV to MP3 converter, or standardize existing mixed-bitrate files with an 320 kbps converter — with the caveat that re-encoding upward cannot restore quality a lower-bitrate file never had, so always encode from the master when one exists.
• Sample rate: 44.1 kHz, stereo. Whatever your session ran at, deliver at the universal playback standard.
• Three or four tracks, best one first. Nobody listens to a twelve-track demo from a stranger. Track one gets heard; choose accordingly.
• Total attachment weight under 25 MB. That is Gmail's attachment ceiling and a sane courtesy everywhere else. Three tracks at 320 kbps fits. If you are over, an MP3 compressor brings the total down — 256 kbps is still excellent for music, and the compression FAQ explains the settings trade-offs.

Why not send WAVs "for quality"? Because the demo stage is about the song, and 320 kbps MP3 is transparent enough that nobody has ever passed on a good song because of it. The MP3 vs WAV FAQ covers where lossless actually matters — mastering, distribution, licensing — which is the conversation you get to have after someone likes the demo.

Naming: the part everyone gets wrong

Your files will be dragged out of the email into a folder containing two hundred other bands' files. If the filename does not identify you, you no longer exist. The convention:

• ArtistName - TrackTitle.mp3 — nothing else. No "final," no version numbers, no dates.
• Fill in the ID3 tags: artist, title, album ("Demo 2026" is fine), and a contact email in the comment field. When your file surfaces in someone's player three weeks later with no email attached to it, the tags are your only identification. The ID3 metadata FAQ covers what the tags carry and how players display them.
• Embed modest cover art if you have it — it makes the file look finished in every player's now-playing screen.

Tune the package to the recipient

• Venue bookers care whether you can fill a Tuesday. Live-sounding recordings beat polished studio tracks; include your draw and the dates you are asking about in two sentences.
• Blogs and playlist curators want one track, not four — pitch the single, link the rest. Many state a preference for streaming links only; read the submission page before attaching anything.
• Labels and A&R is where "best song first" matters most, and where your email body should be three sentences: who you are, one number that matters (streams, draw, previous release), and what you are asking for. The music does the rest or it does not.

The streaming link, done right

Since the link is what most recipients will actually click, treat it with the same care as the files. Use a private or unlisted link rather than your public profile, so the booker hears the three tracks you chose in the order you chose them — not your entire upload history. Check that the link plays without requiring an account or an app install, because every login wall resurrects the friction you just eliminated from the attachments. And keep the link alive: demos get revisited weeks later when a support slot opens, and a dead link at that moment is a silent no. If the platform shows play counts, resist checking them daily; if it allows a description, put your contact email there too, mirroring the ID3 tags, so the path back to you survives any amount of forwarding.

The pre-send checklist

• Three or four tracks, strongest first, 320 kbps MP3, 44.1 kHz.
• Files named Artist - Title.mp3; ID3 tags and contact email embedded.
• Total attachments under 25 MB; streaming link in the email body.
• Listened to the actual attached files start to finish — not the masters, the attachments.
• Two-sentence email that says who you are and what you are asking for.

None of this makes a mediocre song good. What it does is guarantee that the decision gets made on the music instead of on the friction — which is all a demo can ask for, and more than most demos get.