Poll: Do Fans Buy Music Through Widgets?

There’s certainly enough hype about widgets and seemingly innocuous suggestions that they are the future of music distribution and that they allow music to ‘go viral’. You can stream your music, collect fan e-mail addresses, allow fans to embed the widget on their own websites, share the music on various social networks, etc. That’s all great, but these sound more like things that artists want to do rather than things fans want to do. Or a solution looking for a problem to solve. I’ve personally never had any desire to sell other bands’ music from my own website. I’ve also never actually purchased music through a widget (though I definitely have listened to music through many, which is a different story).

I’m still far too young to be called a curmudgeon, but I’d definitely consider myself highly skeptical of the amount of hype certain ideas are getting in the business. Let’s try to keep things grounded by what’s actually happening in reality.

So my question to you is: Have you actually purchased (i.e. actually opened up your wallet and entered in credit card information for) music through an online widget?

If I can ask you guys to share this poll, it’d help to have as large of a pool of responses as we can possibly get.