Sending demos to A and Rs: WAV or MP3?

WAV or MP3 is one of those questions that has a different right answer at different points in the pitch. Send the wrong format at the wrong stage and you either look unprofessional or you waste three hours of your collaborator's bandwidth on a file nobody needed at that quality. I've done both. Here's the rule I land on.

The short answer

For first contact, send MP3 at 320 kbps. For a serious pitch where someone's actually considering signing you, send WAV. For the final delivery after the deal, send WAV stems and a mastered WAV bounce. That's the rhythm: MP3, then WAV, then WAV plus stems.

Why MP3 for first contact

An A and R opening your link for the first time doesn't need audiophile quality. They need to know in 30 seconds whether the song is worth the rest of their week. A 320 kbps MP3 of a four-minute song is about 10 MB. It streams or downloads instantly on any connection. They click, they listen, they decide.

A WAV of the same song is around 45 MB. On the A and R's side, that's a longer download. On your side, uploading ten demo WAVs to shop around is 450 MB you didn't need to push. On a Glo line in Abuja at 8pm, that's an hour you'll never get back.

320 kbps MP3 is, for most listeners in most listening conditions, indistinguishable from WAV. The people who can reliably tell the difference are mastering engineers on monitored rooms with $8,000 speakers. An A and R on AirPods at a Monday meeting isn't that person. Save the WAV for when it matters.

There's real debate on this. Some producers I respect send WAV from the first email because they want the A and R to hear the track at full quality. Fine argument. I disagree because I've watched too many links go unopened when the file was "too big to download right now, I'll get to it later." Later doesn't happen. Smaller file, better odds of a listen.

When to switch to WAV

The minute someone says "send me the full thing" or "I want to play this for my team" or "our mixing engineer wants to take a look," switch to WAV. That's the signal that the song is being evaluated, not screened.

WAV at 24-bit, 44.1 kHz is the standard. 48 kHz if the track is heading for film or TV pitching, where video production works at 48. Don't dither unless you know what you're dithering for. Most demo WAVs I send are the direct bounce out of the mastering chain, un-dithered, because the song will likely be re-processed on the other end.

The bitrate question for MP3

320 kbps is the ceiling for MP3 and it's where you should always send. 256 kbps is acceptable. 192 is not. Below 192, the artifacts are audible to anyone with trained ears, and A and Rs have trained ears even if they pretend not to. Encoding down to 128 kbps to save size is a false economy. At 128, hi-hats smear and sibilance gets weird, and you've lost the quality edge that made you send audio in the first place.

If your DAW gives you the option, use a good encoder. LAME V0 (variable bitrate) is actually higher quality than 320 CBR in most cases, and about the same size. Logic Pro, Ableton, and Studio One all use LAME by default. FL Studio's built-in encoder is fine too, if not as surgical.

File naming, because this matters more than you think

ARTISTNAME_TRACKNAME_BPM_KEY.mp3 is the standard. Eko_Drift_88BPM_Fmin.mp3 tells the A and R exactly what they're listening to without opening the metadata. Don't send demo_final_v3.mp3. That's what gets deleted on sight.

Embed the ID3 tags properly. Artist, title, year. If you've got a contact email, put it in the "comments" field. A and Rs swap files around, and if the tags don't say who you are, your track becomes an untraceable loop on someone's hard drive.

The upload-time reality on Nigerian internet

A 10 MB MP3 uploads in under 30 seconds on a decent 4G line. A 45 MB WAV takes two to four minutes. A stem pack with a mastered WAV plus eight stem WAVs is around 400 MB, which is 8 to 15 minutes on a good connection and 30 minutes on a bad one. For the ISP-by-ISP breakdown, we've covered sending large files in Nigeria in detail.

If you're uploading from Lagos at 2am on MTN Fibre, everything is fast. If you're on Glo mobile data at 7pm in Port Harcourt, budget triple the time. The physics don't care about your deadline.

What to send with the audio

A short note. One paragraph. What the song is, who you are, what you're asking for (a listen, a pitch, a sign). A link to your SoundCloud or Audiomack if you have a catalogue. Don't send a bio. Don't send a mood board. The A and R's job is to listen to the song, not read about you.

If you're sending a full stem pack to a mastering engineer, that's a different situation. There's a related piece on sending beat packs to collaborators that covers the stem-handoff format.

One outside read

Sweetwater's guide on audio file formats is the standard reference if you want the technical breakdown on bit depth and sample rate tradeoffs. Skip the marketing, read the tables.

Shipping it

Send the MP3 directly and don't wait. Demos don't age well on your hard drive. If you end up shopping the same track to a dozen A and Rs, the pricing page has options for volume senders.

One more thing: don't send a zipped MP3. A single MP3 doesn't need to be in a zip. It adds a click for the receiver, and clicks lose listens.