Instrumental Music

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This has been our most successful Christmas gift offer yet.

Over a 1000 downloads - mostly to the USA but many other parts of the world too.

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a lot more Rags using the new Native Instruments Gamelan - so more good things in store for the new year.

In the mean time I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Peaceful New Year.

After mulling it over for a while I have decided to tackle the Big Update.

Yes that's the complete shop overhaul!

OS Commerce has come up with an 3.0 alpha version with a more controllable template CSS and all that and I don't need the outstanding items flagged for later releases.

This time I am going to integrate the shop with the rest of the site whilst retaining the existing URLs and take the opportunity to update the overall appearance: colour scheme, Menus - the works. I'm even going to replace the database to remove any wrinkles that may have crept in.

As far as I can see I just need to rent a second database and set up a development area in my existing web space to be able to develop and test as I go along. Then I should be able to change over quickly and easily.

Never the less I expect this will take quite some time and if I hit anything interesting I'll do more posts.

Other wise it has been a quiet summer again while the students are on their holidays. There are occasional download problems as new browsers come out and I have reinforced our Firefox recommendation because no matter what other issues occur with Firefox from time to time the download functionality seems to be very stable and user friendly. The You Send It facility which we rent as a backup distribution solution has never failed. The new sample player is one of the occasional casualties on my set up but it never generates complaints so I am sticking with it.

The new Google Webmaster tools have exposed a new phenomena in Google search behaviour.

It has become evident from my results that far and away the vast majority of searchers only look at the first result on the results page. This is a huge change from years gone by when you could get some hits from the second page let alone the bottom of the first page. People don't pay for the 1,2,3 ads in my sector because the is not enough money in it but you can see how effective it must be in other sectors.

It would appear that Google's progressive refinements to their algorithms have achieved near perfection form the searcher's point of view. This doesn't reflect some of my own experience as a searcher but perhaps that is a signal that what I am looking for may not be available.

This makes the challenge of site optimistation much greater and must have implications for small competitors versus large ones. On the other hand I suppose the constant churn does give more that one player a shot at the number one slot.

It's those "Interesting Times" again!

After a major change like the removal of Ring tones from the product range there is a lot of tidying up to do.

Dreamweaver comes into its own as a mangangement tool - enabling a site wide search for references across 5000+ files.

The on line free site map tool at http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp helps too with identification of remaining site quality issues - some of which still have to be fixed. Broken links caused by typos etc.

A little trip down memory lane to the menu files and a follow up today to finish the job.

There is an opportunity to revamp the whole side bar now but I'm going to mull that over for a while.

Oddly enough the price changes seems to have gone through relatively smoothly. Although there is little in the way of automation to help with the HTML, the back end system is relatively rigourus because the prices are only kept in one database table and that is what get's charged. Because I was editing the table in Excel I was able to use sorting techniques to check the integrity of the application of the pricing policy. The first paying customer has now ventured in and all seems to be well.

When we opened this site our declared pricing strategy was to follow iTunes. What we ncould not anticpate was that it would be so stable for so many years.

But the dollar a track bulwark is beginning to crack and we have decided to go with the flow.

So we have now implemented a new structure based on track duration.

5 minutes or more 0.99$(US)
4-5 minutes 0.69$(US)
3-4 minutes 0.49$(US)
<3 minutes 0.29$(US)

The PayPal processing fee has been retained for orders below 3$(US) and the 30% discounts still kick in on orders for 3 or more items.

So far there has been no response to these massive price cuts - perhaps price never was an issue and music buyers are not as rational as all that.

Oh and by the way we have bailed out of the Ring tone game but they might come back as freebies I suppose because they are quite nice. It was fun to do but never caught on commercially possibly because they only work on phones that can download the MP3 file from the PC.

At last we have got them launched.

The production process for these recordings was a joy. It has taken a little while to get familiar with the capabilities of our new set up and the experience with the Beethoven Symphonies was very instructive.

I have always loved the Mozart concertos which we have interpreted here and it was great fun working out how to arrange them to best effect. The quality of the MIDI files on which they are based is good and we now have a fairly settled mix and mastering approach which produces repeatable results.

We have used the Talking Steel module before to under pin or supplement the steel drums but in the Horn concerto it comes into it's own as the lead instrument. In contrast for the Flute and Harp Concerto we used a Flute and Harp as the lead instruments and a percussion band as the orchestra but the wonders of electronic music mean that we were able to make them more prominent.

We don't have complete Mozart Symphonies but the two first movements we have recorded stand up on their own.

We haven't decided where to go next on the recording front and there is more work to be done on the web site and the commercial side of things.

The new sample player technology seems to be working well and with that and the new hifi samples we have doubled the volume of download data from the site every day and after a somewhat sticky period our advertising revenue has picked up again.