Skip to main content

Beethoven's Domination

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 link to download the MP3 included in each tweet people go to the profile and thence to the website.

There are some arrangements waiting for that final polish before publication and the Easter holidays should provide the opportunity to get them completed and loaded on the site.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).
Read more

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.
Read more

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.
Read more