Instrumental Music

Just a quick post to mark the new year. The launch of our splendid Gamelan Ragtime recordings has passed with very little reaction if you ignore a brief surge of interest from Indonesia - we now have over 300 recordings available for sale on the site. The new pricing structure seems to have had very little impact with very few customers taking advantage of the very generous discount for second and subsequent orders. We had the usual surge of interest over the Holidays as people tried to learn how to use their new MP3 players and iTunes. Interest in the nutcracker suite also peaked in the run up to the Holidays while things like the Danse Macabre fell back. Yet again our recording of Carol of the Bells proved to be a popular free download with about 1000 copies being taken again this year. Partly because of the larger size of the samples offered on our more recent recordings and the automatic player on most pages the volume of sample data streamed from the site continues to grow with ...

Adding 93 new produsts to the website is no mean task - not least the complex of files and code that deliver the streamed samples. There are still a couple of outstanding issues on this front but we should be able to resolve them soon. The remaining task is to individualise the catalog products for each product - this is not critical to the operational performance of the site but hopefully will encourage more sales and improve our Google rankings. The development of the Face book page is also proving a bit of a challenge but I am concentrating on the website at this stage.

Native Instruments launched the Balinese Gamelan Orchestra last year and I juast couldn't resist. It took a while to develop a suitable ensemble arrangement for ragtime music but once we had found it there was much pleaure in it's repeated application. Essentially the three main componenbts are arranged on the right hand part and separated on the stereo map with the highest frequency on the outside and the more mellow tones near the centre. The marimbas varied rather more depending on the piece but many of them emplyed a version which runs short seqences for each note - producing a rippling effect in the left hand to add interest and body to the arrangements and improve the balance. In many tracks - particularly the Rags and the Marches a base drum was added to the centre of the mix. This has been great fun to produce. We tried to contact John Cowell who produced most of the midi recordings on which these were based but none of the email addresses produced any response. Unlik...

We have tried a price per duration structure for the last year or so and it hasn't made any difference so now we have gone for simplicity. The Low Value Order Premium has gone for good. A 50% discount now aplies to all orders for two or more tracks. All tracks are now priced at $1.00. So the minimum order value is now slightly higher for a single short piece but multiple orders at Download2MP3 are even better value than before.

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This has been our most successful Christmas gift offer yet. Over a 1000 downloads - mostly to the USA but many other parts of the world too. Over the last couple of months I have been working on a lot more Rags using the new Native Instruments Gamelan - so more good things in store for the new year. In the mean time I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Peaceful New Year.

After mulling it over for a while I have decided to tackle the Big Update. Yes that's the complete shop overhaul! OS Commerce has come up with an 3.0 alpha version with a more controllable template CSS and all that and I don't need the outstanding items flagged for later releases. This time I am going to integrate the shop with the rest of the site whilst retaining the existing URLs and take the opportunity to update the overall appearance: colour scheme, Menus - the works. I'm even going to replace the database to remove any wrinkles that may have crept in. As far as I can see I just need to rent a second database and set up a development area in my existing web space to be able to develop and test as I go along. Then I should be able to change over quickly and easily. Never the less I expect this will take quite some time and if I hit anything interesting I'll do more posts. Other wise it has been a quiet summer again while the students are on their holidays. There ...

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.