Instrumental Music

Yes it was a slog but our Ring tone pages have been re-configured to take account of the Bit Pass switch off. This work has exposed a problem with the More Bach entries in the catalog because the samples don't play on the catalog pages - not sure how I missed that on earlier. But today we are flogging through the remaining individual product pages to complete the removal of all traces of Bit Pass from our site only a few days after their closure.

The faint hope that a replacement supplier would appear to rescue us from the Bit Pass debacle is fading fast. The only one to poke their noses above the parapet look to be far to expensive for us. So we are slogging on - the composer pages are done but not the ring tones yet and only some of the selections pages. The individual track pages are a particular problem - they are not strictly necessary in the new configuration but I am reluctant to abandon them in case a Bit Pass replacement emerges and we can re-use them and their search engine positions so we are going to have to come up with some intelligent visitor guidance copy and boiler plate that.

Looking for the best way to respond to the BitPass debacle we have decided to simplify the main Composer and Selection pages with a "Listen & Buy" call to action against each product. The button then takes them to the product page in the shop which plays the clip and included the product details so they can be removed from the tables on the main pages. This leaves the product pages without a real role for the time being but they do draw in some traffic so we'll remove the BitPass content and leave them up for the time being while we consider whether we can replace BitPass for single purchases. Of course these are the last pages that we will be able to update not least because there are so many of them. The first of the new selection pages is already up : Steel Drums - because we needed to do a live test of the new design. If any one has any thoughts or reactions to any of this they would be most welcome - in public as a Blog Comment or privately by email to webmas...

They hoped it was just another hoax but the Bit Pass website today confirms that they are closing down in the next few days. This is sad because they really seemed to fill a need and they performed well - we had very few complaints and their system allowed us to resolve them promptly. For a business like ours that has been built around a unique service of this kind this is a hammer blow. We will obviously have to refocus around our own OS Commerce online store facilities but we know that they are less attractive to the casual browser not least because of the cost of individual transactions with Pay Pal. So we start today on the stack of work involved in deleting Bit Pass from hundreds of pages and replacing them with links to our store pages. And removing all the other references to it in the text and updating the calls to action to reflect the new situation. Not to mention some of the operational difficulties we have had recently with our store that need to be fixed. Lucky we didn...

In the light of recent publicity in news groups etc I had another look at All of MP3 . com and removed it from our legal mp3 search facility. Although they do claim to abide by their own local copyright legislation this isn't really good enough in my opinion when you are working in a Global market place. Their prices are just too low to allow anything sensible for copyright owners - so they are out.

Inevitably after the holidays the volume of iTunes help enquiries has subsided dramatically but it still obscures what is going on at the summary level. Rank pulse has been showing higher than usual churn in rankings in the last few days but nothing too dramatic. We have launched the Legal MP3 Search facility with it's own page now and done a bit of branding to its appearance. Given the recent publicity we probably need to have another look at the inclusion of the Russian sites in the domain list. But this really isn't going to develop much further if we don't manage to attract any collaborators so that is the splash on all our pages for the next little while and a Press Release may be in order now.

The surge may be over but the dominance of iTunes enquiries continues. Yes we are number 10 for "iTunes help" on Google and yes they do stop and read our helpful advice about dragging and dropping MP3s into iTunes - on average for several minutes - an age in site viewing statistics. But Widor's wedding march continues to be the most popular streamed item with over 100 visits yesterday! More seriously there is evidently a persistent problem with our shop software - we are collecting money but not releasing the goods until we get the payment email and then email the products. I had hoped to wait for the next OsCommerce release to tackle this but it looks like we will have to see it we can fix it now....