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....

It almost doubled the normal number of visitors and on the festive day itself. Our iTune/Pod help pages were prompted by noticing a niche in this area which we sough to fill to our own advantage. We have been relatively successful and these are amongst if not quite always the most popular pages on our site. They also represent some of the longest visits which suggests that they do find the copy useful. But we are very unsuccessful at converting those visitors to listeners or paying customers. On reflection I suppose that this is just a piece of in appropriate targeting and we should really re-visit the whole novelty music issue.

Rank pulse is showing it's highest level of changes in rankings on one day for the last six months, so something is a foot. No comments on the SEO forums yet but I suppose that this is a good time to slip through a big change - too late to have a significant impact on the seasonal commercial activity and a quiet time in which to settle things down. We are seeing one of those seasonal increases in iTunes driven enquiries as people get their new iPods - just wish we knew how to convert a few of them into sales. Interest in the Carol of Bells is flagging a little but we'll keep it there until New Year or maybe even for the full 12 days of Christmas. Merry Christmas!

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.

Looking through the stats I thought I'd come back to the issue of the way our site is used. For a digital content site the whole issue of band width is Giga - we have to buy enough capacity from our ISP to ensure that our visitors and more importantly our customers can down load what they need. The way the site is engineered has some baring on that but at the out set all we had was a best guess. As things stand this month so far MP3 downloads have consumed about 60% of the bandwidth used on the site which is pretty good. Next up are the online steaming samples which appear as Flash animations at 12% but if you add the Javascript for the menu presentation to the gifs, png and jpeg files their combined total is about 16%. Following on are the Html files which include most of our text at about 10%, our CSS layout code at 1% and bringing up the rear PHP for the shop code at less than half a percent. I could wish that the PHP was working a little harder but overall the balance looks ...

We have just taken the time to have a look at the performance of our Christmas gift on the site. We noted earlier that we were quickly on to the first page of Google for that keyword phrase but on looking at and more importantly listening to the competition we have not made enough of our distinctive arrangement. While we might have to acknowledge the superiority of the Leonard Bernstein version ours would come a close second and might even edge ahead for festive values. So a minor up date on the index page is in order - just to make that point. So far nearly 400 downloads have been recorded - not breaking the bandwidth bank but some potential new customers we hope.

Yes our seasonal gesture has got off to a flying start and is now the number one keyword phrase for people searching for our site. This is really quite remarkably responsive and it illustrates the benefits of working with the Google grain rather than against it. In particular the site map facility seems to stream line the Google bot visits. It is also true that with our template page structure we are able to get a message like this out over all our pages very quickly and that must strengthen its impact in the ranking. So Carol of the Bells MP3 finds us at number 9 on the main Google engine and number 5 in our customised Legal MP3 Downloads engine. Without MP3 in the phrase we are nowhere and the addition of Free is no help at all. For those who would like to know more about this tune here is the Wikipedia reference.

Yes , I gave DMOZ a go. I have hardly used it except to register new sites to help them on their way on Google- not sure that works any more but it gives that extra air of respectability to be signed off by a reasonably knowledgeable human being. So it was a bit disappointing to find a significant number of broken or 'temporarily' down sites and one or two with very old news features. But it did take me down some interesting by ways - Mozart's works for mechanical organs and some organ replications. Several more independent sites have been added and we are up to 68 sites in total now. There is a bit of a Classical music bias and I'm going to wait for collaborators to address of other styles.

On virtually all metrics November was our best month yet. This is partly a seasonal recovery from the dog days of the summer when people are away from their PCs and partly a genuine strengthening of our positions on Google. However it has weakened a little in the last week so we are not getting too excited. Never the less I think it is probably time to bring out our Carol of the Bells seasonal gift because last year's press release is still floating around. You can download it free of charge for your personal use from here first: use this link Carol of the Bells in time for the first Sunday of Advent in the Christian Calendar.

Yes it has taken a few days for us to hit on this resource. We have been included in DMOZ almost from the outset and it supports our position in Google but drives next to no traffic. So we should be piling up the human checked sites into our search engine at a much faster rate now. This exercise also highlights the benefits of the focused system we are seeking to develop - there really is quite a lot of dross and repetition in the Google listings which makes me think that they probably focus their effort on cleaning up the first three pages which would make a lot of sense. We've doubled the number of sites included to 36 now.

Instrumental MP3 has not been a very productive seam for new MP3 sites - we have stopped after page 7. The level of site duplication in these listings is quite substantial - might be an interesting topic for exploration some time but anything below page 3 is of academic interest really. But there are some possible promotion sites which we will need to investigate. I have excluded Karaoke sites on the grounds that they are too specialists and can do their own search engine if they need too. So it is off to the specialist areas around our own sites content - classical, composer names, percussion and ragtime then I think it will be time to raise the profile a bit. In the mean time an update on Google - signified by a modest one day spike on Rank Pulse and reduced linking sites and like us sites on Google it self - but little in the way of impact on visitor volumes so far and not picked up on the forums.

This little project has given us a reason to look afresh at the MP3 scene on Google and it is evident that this has improved. There are still some rubbish sites out there but the proportion in the first few pages of search results is much reduced and since that is all that most people ever see Google can be well please. Never the less our editorial approach still seems worth while - we are up to 18 sites included now. Collaborators would be very welcome!

To begin with we just had a look at what Google produces for "MP3 Download" and started a selection from there. To our list of exclusion criteria we have added portals that point to other sites, so far we have included one Russian site that appears to charge prices that are not too ridiculous. We also exclude sites that say "delete after 24 hours and buy the CD" - don't think that would stand up in court. It now produces 443 results for 'mozart mp3' and we are number 10! Should we refine the focus on to instrumental music - another area to explore...

We have made a start on a customised search engine: Legal MP3 Downloads This is raising lots of issues: commercial, legal, organisational and time. So we intend to use the blog to air these and invite participation. The focus of the search engine reflects frustration experienced in the past with sites which quite obviously ignore copyright so we are going for a positive inclusion approach rather than a black list. This has the disadvantage that we won't pick up new sites very quickly and it will take time and effort to be comprehensive but the search results will produce legal MP3 files for download. Not subscription sites are being included they can fend for themselves. However we will include some of the big boys whilst putting most of our effort into the independents and self publishers. The idea is to help searchers find the available versions of specific pieces of music or examples of particular music genre no matter how obscure, without hooking them in to broader or long...