Instrumental Music

The new Google Webmaster tools have exposed a new phenomena in Google search behaviour. It has become evident from my results that far and away the vast majority of searchers only look at the first result on the results page. This is a huge change from years gone by when you could get some hits from the second page let alone the bottom of the first page. People don't pay for the 1,2,3 ads in my sector because the is not enough money in it but you can see how effective it must be in other sectors. It would appear that Google's progressive refinements to their algorithms have achieved near perfection form the searcher's point of view. This doesn't reflect some of my own experience as a searcher but perhaps that is a signal that what I am looking for may not be available. This makes the challenge of site optimistation much greater and must have implications for small competitors versus large ones. On the other hand I suppose the constant churn does give more that one pla...

After a major change like the removal of Ring tones from the product range there is a lot of tidying up to do. Dreamweaver comes into its own as a mangangement tool - enabling a site wide search for references across 5000+ files. The on line free site map tool at http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp helps too with identification of remaining site quality issues - some of which still have to be fixed. Broken links caused by typos etc. A little trip down memory lane to the menu files and a follow up today to finish the job. There is an opportunity to revamp the whole side bar now but I'm going to mull that over for a while. Oddly enough the price changes seems to have gone through relatively smoothly. Although there is little in the way of automation to help with the HTML, the back end system is relatively rigourus because the prices are only kept in one database table and that is what get's charged. Because I was editing the table in Excel I was able to use sor...

When we opened this site our declared pricing strategy was to follow iTunes. What we ncould not anticpate was that it would be so stable for so many years. But the dollar a track bulwark is beginning to crack and we have decided to go with the flow. So we have now implemented a new structure based on track duration. 5 minutes or more 0.99$(US) 4-5 minutes 0.69$(US) 3-4 minutes 0.49$(US) The PayPal processing fee has been retained for orders below 3$(US) and the 30% discounts still kick in on orders for 3 or more items. So far there has been no response to these massive price cuts - perhaps price never was an issue and music buyers are not as rational as all that. Oh and by the way we have bailed out of the Ring tone game but they might come back as freebies I suppose because they are quite nice. It was fun to do but never caught on commercially possibly because they only work on phones that can download the MP3 file from the PC.

At last we have got them launched. The production process for these recordings was a joy. It has taken a little while to get familiar with the capabilities of our new set up and the experience with the Beethoven Symphonies was very instructive. I have always loved the Mozart concertos which we have interpreted here and it was great fun working out how to arrange them to best effect. The quality of the MIDI files on which they are based is good and we now have a fairly settled mix and mastering approach which produces repeatable results. We have used the Talking Steel module before to under pin or supplement the steel drums but in the Horn concerto it comes into it's own as the lead instrument. In contrast for the Flute and Harp Concerto we used a Flute and Harp as the lead instruments and a percussion band as the orchestra but the wonders of electronic music mean that we were able to make them more prominent. We don't have complete Mozart Symphonies but the two first moveme...

Here is a blast from the past - Page rankings on Google. Time was many of us watched anxiously for the next shift in Google's ranking formulae because of the dramatic impact they could have on our site traffic. But for some time now things have been very steady on the page rank site. However today I noticed that music Downloads were in the top 10 volatile sites on the latest little excursion by Google. Here are the top 10: #1 www.apple.com... visit #2 www.kazaa.com visit #3 www.rhapsody.com visit #4 www.napster.com visit #5 music.download.com visit #6 www.ez-tracks.com visit #7 www.virtualsheetmusic.com visit #8 mp3.walmart.com visit #9 www.mtv.com... visit #10 www.limewire.com vis To see the chart got to Rank Pulse here: http://www.rankpulse.com/music-downloads?p0=on&p1=on&p2=on&p3=on&p4=on&p5=on&p6=on&p7=on&p8=on&p9=on (Rank Pulse have got a bit more secure on their image copyrigh...

There are the some modest indications that the new players may be having some effect on the proportion of very short visits to the site which is obviously positive if it is sustained. So we will carry on with the application on the more popular landing pages and see what we can do and perhaps we'll see if we can add one to this blog page.

After making significant changes to the site and launching new products you are naturally prompted to delve a little further in to the site monitoring data. As ever there are mixed results - the use of the new player has substantially increased the volume of music streamed off the site. Some of that is push and some pull and we have more work to do to get a proper handle on that. Suffice it to say that we have plenty of head room on our ISP package to expand the volume still further but I want to do it in a controlled way. There is definitely scope for more page specific play lists and we should be able to have more fun with the site wide players using hidden, randomised play lists. On the other hand we are not seeing much in the way of change to other aspects of the site as yet, apart from the usual random changes that occur from day to day. Hopefully further refinement on the use of pushed music on the site will have positive effects - at the very least we are increasing the audi...

I can't believe it has taken so long but we are finally there and two Beethoven Symphonies have been published. An early bird has already bought the first movement of the Fifth! The hubris of recording these wonderful pieces on new world instruments caused me to pause for some time but each time I listened to them I heard something new and the overall effect was so positive I have pressed ahead. Inevitably some of the machinery was a bit creaky after such little use - not least my memory for where I had put things. We also bought a new player which is taking a little time to bed in - not helped by browser quirks on this PC which refused to play them - sorted now! We're looking to develop the use of play lists as a way of promoting sales but there is a bit more work to do on that. The auto play of the excerpt from the first movement of Beethoven's 5th is a temporary celebration and will be replaced by a more controllable solution later this week. After the repair work we d...

It has been a long time since my last post. Moving house and all the associated tasks have absorbed a lot of time and energy. But the promised reequipping has occurred and after the latest update for Cubase Essential it is nice and stable now and the last major hard landscaping task is almost complete. In celebration we have started to tackle some even more major works and - the height of hubris - a complete Beethoven Symphony is on the stocks. We have developed a New World orchestra with our customary steel drums and marimba in the "stings" section supported by a vibraphone and talking steel. Talking steel also handles the brass section while Ocarina and Pan Pipes take on the wood wind and the flutes are assigned to steel drums. Still a bit more refinement required on the mix but it shouldn't be long now...

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.

Google's algorithms are churning again this week - not a peak but a bit of a surge. Our main beneficiary seems to be our iTunes advice page which is nice but not very productive for us. It is very odd that something we wrote a couple of years ago should be so popular in an area where you would expect much more professional help to be available. Our ISP service has been/is being upgraded so I'm waiting for any fall out from that. OS Commerce have a major update on the stocks so I'm hoping that any significant consequences for us can wait until we tackle that one. From an operational point of view our biggest problem seems to be downloaded files lost in the bowels of the XP operating system. Also noticed today that our ISP have increased the maximum bandwidth of our package dramatically so I'm thinking of putting sample players on a lot more pages. We have a few fans who seem to go through our whole sample library and we will have a look at how we could make that easier ...

Yes - the errant postcard turned up thanks to a nice bit of informal mail re-direction and Google have now satisfied themselves as to my bona fides to the extent that they are willing to make payments into my bank account and present adverts on our site! The added confidence that this seems to give potential customers is also evident in the renewed trickle of sales. Some interesting optimisation opportunities in the light of this experience - onward and upward.

We have been quiet for the last few months while I have been tackling some other projects. The website has been doing well without much in the way of intervention but in the last couple of week we exhausted Google's patience with us on the latest stage of identity verification - I lost the postcard with the PIN and requested the replacement sent to our old address! The absence of relevant adverts seems to be having a very negative effect on sales which is very odd. We have also seen the seasonal surge of visits from new i-pod users to our remarkably popular help pages but hat has ebbed away now and visitor numbers have subsided a bit. So this is the year to sort out a few basics and return to the creation of new and original arrangements with some new software and hardware.

Yes it has been a long time. The new house has preoccupied my thoughts and time and is still doing so. This is just a short update. Visitor volumes are riding high but volatile. Sales are strengthening too. After the massive spasm of updates on Google there have been lesser by relatively frequent spikes of activity on Rank Pulse indicating that Google has become more active in updating rankings. The new webmaster tools also show the shifting patterns of positions and search behavior. It is coming up to Halloween and Danse Macabre by Saint Saens is top of the charts for a few more days again this year.

Just a quick comment to note that the churn of SERPs on Google has died down again after the longest period of high activity I have seen since I started to use the Rank Pulse site. RankPulse Graph This is obviously their copyright material but I don't suppose they will mind us giving them a plug. Oddly the most active chart today is for the letter 'i' but 'mattress' illustrates the recent turmoil more vividly. We seem to have once again bubbled up slowly across the piece. Now that the new office is set up we will have to do some more work on the site and the ads some of which are doing well while others have failed to perform at all.

The exceptionally high level of flux in the Google search results has now continued for two weeks - twice as long as previous episodes. This suggests that Google are testing significant refinements of elements of their algorithm in the continuing campaign against Spam. This doesn't appear to be a problem in our area these days and although we are seeing fluctuations in SERPs, visitor numbers continue at high levels. Meanwhile inappropriate comments have been added to this blog so we have hidden them all. Disappointingly comments have never played a significant role here so in some ways this is not much of a loss but it is irritating to have to respond like this. We will investigate the prospects for moderated comments in due course.

Rankpulse has again registered a significant surge in SERPs change on Google - much too early to say what that may mean for us. We have been quiet for a while because we are moving premises - a new studio/office is being delivered today. We have moved out of Greater London to the sunny uplands of the North Downs - let's see what this does for our creativity. August was a quieter month as usual but the students are coming back and so should our visitor numbers.

Customer contact is one of the bonuses of running this sort of business. It is only with that customer feedback that you pick up the problems they have experienced and give yourself a chance to fix them. Over the past couple of years the most frequent difficulties have been concerned with downloading. We fixed the worst of those with the updates we did earlier this year but Microsoft still come up with new ways to hide files downloaded with IE if you don't arrange the settings properly. The one thing that has never been questioned in the whole time has been the quality of our recordings - until yesterday that is. A customer in Australia down loaded the recording of the Brahms Hungarian Dance No 6 he had bought - it played OK on the PC but when he burned it on to a CD it crackled like crazy! Now for some reason I had never burned one of our recordings to a CD - so I tried it with the Microsoft Media Player and the same recording - result perfect! Normally you assume that with di...

Looking back July has been our best month on all dimensions so far. We had more visitors, hits and downloads than any month previously. Sales were also healthy but we are now also benefiting from the revenue from the Google AdSense campaign. During the month we increased the amount of advertising space on our pages and we have seen the effects of that coming through. We have tried the search option but that isn't doing much for us at the moment and we are now going to try some referrals. In particular we have found that some of our customers who use IE have not set it up very handily for downloading music and they are unable to find the file after hearing it for the first time. We have always been able to resolve this for them but plan to recommend Firefox on the basis of it's superior downloading facilities. August has always been a slow month for us and it is shaping up that way again this year - presumably this is because schools and colleges tend to be closed for most if...

Rankpulse has recorded another Google event about half the size of the last one but bigger than anything else in the last 6 months. Yes it is churn and more churn. Our Keywords roil and boil on an almost daily basis but our overall performance is pretty steady. I'm not sure if this isn't a new Google tactic to keep the spammers off balance and test user reactions to a variety of ranking algorithm settings. Our visitor numbers have come slightly off their peak levels but have held steadily well above previous heights. Customer orders are up too and so is our AdSense Content based advertising revenue. The task of re-formatting our streaming pages to allow inclusion of more advertising is well under way but it is a bit laborious. Once that is complete we'll go back and try to fix the AdSense Search facility so that it allows searches of our site. Then we can try deploying that more widely. As it is some one found it lurking on our site map yesterday and had a go.