Thirty seconds is the honest default

Most “free music” sites still do the same trick: they put a familiar play triangle on a cover, then stream a file nobody licensed to them. Listeners get used to that triangle meaning the whole song. When the file disappears, or a takedown lands, the habit stays. Wave starts from the opposite habit.

Apple Music and Spotify already publish thirty-second clips for discovery. Those clips are meant to be used by third-party indexes. They are not a loophole for the album. If you are not signed in on Wave, that clip is the entire playback. There is no second request that quietly fetches a longer file.

Why the short clip is the product, not a teaser

A preview is honest because it matches the license. It also matches how people actually decide: thirty seconds is enough to know whether you want the record, the playlist, or the official video. Stretching that into a bootleg does not make the site more musical. It makes the site a liability.

Signed-in members can hear a full performance only when we find the official artist video of the same title — the artist channel, VEVO, or the artist Topic channel. That is still not “Wave hosting the song.” It is Wave pointing at a page the rights holder already put on YouTube. If the match fails, we stay on the clip. A wrong video is worse than a short one.

What this means for charts

The home page charts are an index, not a warehouse. Names, artwork, and preview URLs come from public feeds so you can find what is new. The writing, the player, the queue, and the wallet are the product. If a chart row has no official video yet, it should still be useful as a preview. That is a feature, not a bug we will “fix” by ripping audio.