Instrumental Music

Bach is now more fully represented in the dialy Twitter campaign and there are some indications that his posion has been strengthened. The volume of impressions on Beethoven keywords means that he is still very dominant and some of the Bach activity is much more variable from day to day both interms of impressions and click through rates. Twitter have been messing about with the way pictures are treated and that has caused some rework on the saved tweets but it is more or less sorted now. This activity has increased the number of saved tweets somewhat so the repetitions are less frequent.

Here's a big thank you to our latest generous donors Brown and Bartholomew. It is lovely to get the daily likes on Twitter, the listings and the occasional re-tweets but there's nothing like the approbation signified by cash. Our Rotary club works hard to raise the funds we disburse to local and international charities and the donations from this website go directly to those funds. We make sure that the projects we support reflect genuine need and are professionally managed. The site comprises recordings made over more than 15 years of a variety of styles illustrating what can be done with percussion supported by the occasional Ocarina and harp. The site continues to thrive with our renditions of Beethoven's work reflecting the popularity of that composer but one of our early recordings has just broken through to the top of the downloads - the famous Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor on Mega Moog and steel drums. I have long felt that our Bach recordings don't...

The last few months have been relatively uneventful - still retaining that amazing number 1 slot for "beethoven symphony mp3". The retweets are relatively infrequent but when they happen I can often see the impact. The Twitter list additions feel like long term investments. Analytics reports an average position of 7.9 over nearly 1000 appearencesfor an impression to be made. The deepest dredge goes to Gounod Gallia at 322 - I couldn't find it today but of course my search results are biased towards my site. However this indicates a high level of interest so I feel a new set of tweets coming on to support the pieces that are being dredged for.

From the start my arrangements of Beethoven Marches and Bagatelles were amongst the most popular recordings on the site along with the evergreen Can Can and seasonal popularity for a few other pieces. But since the complete recordings of all 9 symphonies were published Beethoven dominates the download profile. A lot of the interest seems to come from countries like India who appear to be more open to a fresh interpreation of Western Classical music. This is one of the rasons why I am persisting with the Twitter campaign because it gives exposure to parts of the site which would otherwise never see the light of day. The word file containing the tweets is now up to version 13 and we are now up to a ten day cycle of 16 daily tweets. This typically generates about 17,000 tweet impressions a month. The engagement levels recorded by Twitter Analytics are surprisingly & disappointingly low but the constant flow of likes in encouraging. It would appear that rather than following the li...

January was our Sousa month - a new composer page with lots of the famous marches including the Liberty Bell which was used by the Monty Python team and as part of the sound track of one of the St Trinian's films. Sousa is particularly interesting because he was composing at the same time as Ragtime was emerging but of course in a very different position in USA society working as he did for several years for the White House. As of today the tweets programme moves up to a nine day cycle and there will be some hash tag changes. The retweets have tailed off but there is a steady flow of likes and a surprising growth of followers. The next composer for attention is Muzorsky now that I've found some out of copyright material to work with.