Instrumental Music

Persistance does it It is now 15 years since this website was launched. In that time we have had ups and downs - some associated with Google algorithm changes but this year we seem to have seen steady growth in visits and some dramatic download volumes. It looks as if we might reach 1000 giga bytes of download this month for the first time ever.  Our global reach is wider - although Indonesia and India still account for over 25% of visits we had visits from 126 countries in the last week exceptions include Uragauy and some sub sahara countries. The bulk come through organic Google searches with the next largest share coming from our daily tweets. 

It has been a long time since my last entry. I am still struggling wih the the update to both software and hardware system used to produce these recordings. In the meantime the combination of the daily Twitter campaign and the organic performance of Google continue grow the level of visits and downloads. Mozart and Beethoven now share the top ten slots evenly between them. Much of our audience is in the third world who are not able to afford to donate but it would be encouraging if more was to be forthcoming from our wealthier users.

Following up on yesterday's blog - I have done a little anaysis on the MP3 downloads  to date in May. As expected Beethoven comes out head and shoulders above every one else at around 50K full and partial downloads - i.e over 25% of the total. Mozart comes in a strong second at 23K and is followed by Bach at nearly 7K. Debussy just about managed 1K and every other composer was less than that. Amongst the Ragtime Composers Scott Joplin did best at 852 but was beaten by the gamelan rag collection at just over 1K. Selections generally did very poorly with the exception of the Marimba selection which came in at 331 MP3 downloads. But the surprise result from this exercise was the observation that the pieces featured on our 16 daily tweets did much better than their fellows whethe they were classical or not. Roughly roughly it looks as if each tweeted MP3 is downloaded about 25 time so that is a lotal of 400 per day or 10K per month or 5% of the total. This is a very different

Since this site was launched there has been a radical shift in the source of visitors away from the USA, Canada and a less extent Europe towards South East Asia and specifically India and Indonesia. Where it was reasonable to suppose that some at least of the First World users would be willing to put their hands in their pockets to support humanitarian causes usually but not exclusively in the Third World the reverse is evidently not the case. So our donationware is now probably best seen as a generous provision of free access to an interpretation of some of the best of western music in a form which is more familiar to a drum based musical frame of reference. Still very consistent with Rotary International's principals of sharing mutual understanding between counties around the world and achieved at very modest cost.

Hadn't really looked at the download stats in the new suite except to see what was managing to get into the top ten alongside Beethoven. So far this May we have had nearly 41000 complete downloads and 55000 incomplete downloads. As you'd expect the incompletes are concentrated in the popular long pieces like Beethoven symphony movements. For some reason (probably alphabetic do you think) Scott joplin's Weeping Willow was the least popular along with 50 others on just one complete download out of the 800different MP3 files downloaded. Perhaps more analysis later.

For years our Mozart arrangements failed to achieve the recognition they deserved but in the last few months this has changed. Our Mozart page has move up the Google and Yandex search results and now benefits substantially from the high level of interest in this composer. Just wondering what I need to do to help Bach keep up. There are some odd features to the usage of our site - some of it almost looks like streaming as gigabytes are down loaded or there are thousands of page hits from what is reported as a Russian search index robot. No, perhaps Google just badly underestimate how popular we are in Russia because they are not so popular there. According to Google India and Indonesia are still the mainstays of our audience with Nigeria and South Africa nudging in just below the USA. So it seems we are supporting developing countries just not in the way orgiginally envisaged.

But you would not have noticed, so smooth was the transition. We have been with the same ISP, on the same platform since the site was launched. It had gone through a few changes of ownership but service continuity was maintained until September. The first symptom of incipient obsolescence was the stats package failure. The process of authorizing the move was protracted but the actual transition was extraordinarily smooth. FTPing the files across took a while but was invisible to users. The net effect seems to have been positive in terms of usage - latest peak download in one day 30 gigabits.