Many people meet your song through a short clip before they hear the whole thing: a sound under a TikTok video, a preview in an app, a few seconds in a story. Where that clip starts can decide whether they keep listening. The preview start time, often called the TikTok start time, is one small field in your release form, and it deserves as much thought as the cover.
What a preview clip is
Several platforms work with short excerpts of a track rather than the whole song. Short-video apps offer a clip of your track as a sound people put under their videos. Some stores and apps play a preview to listeners before or instead of the full track. How long these clips are and how they are chosen differs by platform and changes over time.
What matters for you: unless you say otherwise, the clip may start at the beginning of the song or wherever the platform decides. For many songs the beginning is the worst possible place: a quiet intro, a count-in, a long instrumental build.
Choosing the moment
Ask one question: which few seconds of this song would make someone stop scrolling and give them something to do?
Good candidates:
- The hook or the first line of the chorus. The most memorable melody and the words people will sing along to.
- The drop. In electronic and dance music, the moment the beat lands after the build.
- A quotable line. A lyric that works as a caption, a joke or a confession. People build videos around words.
- A change people can edit to. A beat switch, a sudden stop, a key change. Ideal for transitions and before-and-after videos.
Think about how people will use it. Dance videos need a steady groove. Lip-sync needs clear words. Emotional storytelling needs a line that matches a feeling. A song can have several good moments, but you set one start time, so choose the use you want most.
Get the exact second right
A few details make a real difference:
- Start just before the moment, not exactly on it. If the chorus starts at 0:47, a start at 0:46 leaves room for a breath or pickup, so the clip does not open in the middle of a syllable.
- Measure on the final master. If the intro was edited after the demo, every timing has moved. Use the exact WAV you are submitting.
- Measure precisely. Use your DAW's timeline or a player that shows exact seconds, not a phone's progress bar.
- Listen to what follows. You do not control the clip length, so play the half minute after your start point. If the strongest part lasts ten seconds and then drops into a quiet verse, try a slightly different start.
- On an album, set it per track. Every song has its own moment.
Test before you submit
Do not decide in your head. Cut three candidate clips from three different start points and use them: post them as teasers, put them under simple videos, send them to a few friends without explanation. Notice which one people replay, comment on or use themselves.
Singer Sana Brook was sure the chorus of her new song was the moment. In her tests, a line from the bridge got far more reactions, because it worked as a caption on its own. She set the start time to the bridge. The chorus still carries the full song, and the bridge carries the short videos.
Telling your distributor the start time
Many distributors let you enter a preview start time when you submit a release. On CULT the artist enters the second where the preview clip should start as part of the submission. Decide it before you submit, together with the rest of the metadata, because changing it after delivery can be slow or impossible on some platforms.
If no start time is given, platforms use their own default, which may be the very beginning of the track. That works for a song that opens with its hook. For everything else, a few minutes of testing is well spent.
When the clip takes off
If people start using your sound, join in. Use the same sound in your own videos instead of uploading the audio again, so the activity gathers around one sound rather than several copies. Keep the song title and artist name spelt exactly the same everywhere.
And if a different part of the song catches on by itself, follow your listeners rather than fighting them. Post your own videos with that part, and let the short clip lead people to the full song.