Instrumental Music

Following up on yesterday's blog - I have done a little anaysis on the MP3 downloads  to date in May. As expected Beethoven comes out head and shoulders above every one else at around 50K full and partial downloads - i.e over 25% of the total. Mozart comes in a strong second at 23K and is followed by Bach at nearly 7K. Debussy just about managed 1K and every other composer was less than that. Amongst the Ragtime Composers Scott Joplin did best at 852 but was beaten by the gamelan rag collection at just over 1K. Selections generally did very poorly with the exception of the Marimba selection which came in at 331 MP3 downloads. But the surprise result from this exercise was the observation that the pieces featured on our 16 daily tweets did much better than their fellows whethe they were classical or not. Roughly roughly it looks as if each tweeted MP3 is downloaded about 25 time so that is a lotal of 400 per day or 10K per month or 5% of the total. This is a very different...

Since this site was launched there has been a radical shift in the source of visitors away from the USA, Canada and a less extent Europe towards South East Asia and specifically India and Indonesia. Where it was reasonable to suppose that some at least of the First World users would be willing to put their hands in their pockets to support humanitarian causes usually but not exclusively in the Third World the reverse is evidently not the case. So our donationware is now probably best seen as a generous provision of free access to an interpretation of some of the best of western music in a form which is more familiar to a drum based musical frame of reference. Still very consistent with Rotary International's principals of sharing mutual understanding between counties around the world and achieved at very modest cost.

Hadn't really looked at the download stats in the new suite except to see what was managing to get into the top ten alongside Beethoven. So far this May we have had nearly 41000 complete downloads and 55000 incomplete downloads. As you'd expect the incompletes are concentrated in the popular long pieces like Beethoven symphony movements. For some reason (probably alphabetic do you think) Scott joplin's Weeping Willow was the least popular along with 50 others on just one complete download out of the 800different MP3 files downloaded. Perhaps more analysis later.

For years our Mozart arrangements failed to achieve the recognition they deserved but in the last few months this has changed. Our Mozart page has move up the Google and Yandex search results and now benefits substantially from the high level of interest in this composer. Just wondering what I need to do to help Bach keep up. There are some odd features to the usage of our site - some of it almost looks like streaming as gigabytes are down loaded or there are thousands of page hits from what is reported as a Russian search index robot. No, perhaps Google just badly underestimate how popular we are in Russia because they are not so popular there. According to Google India and Indonesia are still the mainstays of our audience with Nigeria and South Africa nudging in just below the USA. So it seems we are supporting developing countries just not in the way orgiginally envisaged.

But you would not have noticed, so smooth was the transition. We have been with the same ISP, on the same platform since the site was launched. It had gone through a few changes of ownership but service continuity was maintained until September. The first symptom of incipient obsolescence was the stats package failure. The process of authorizing the move was protracted but the actual transition was extraordinarily smooth. FTPing the files across took a while but was invisible to users. The net effect seems to have been positive in terms of usage - latest peak download in one day 30 gigabits.

Just the occasional update here these days. It looks like we were one of the winners in the latest refinement to the Google search results algorithm and our average position went up a percent. We now get about 60 % of our traffic from phones so it was worth all that effort of setting up mobile optimized pages. Our bounce rate is down substantially from historical levels although it is still higher than one would like. Our click through rates varies enormously depending on the search term used as well as our position on the results page so it is all rather really tricky to interpret. However it does seem clear that most searchers only find out about our interpretation of the piece once they get to our site. We are still big in India and Indonesia, home of the gamalan and Beethoven outperforms everything else. Working on some new recordings when time permits so there will be some updates latter this year.

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.

It has, as they say, been a busy year. The mobile site update has had a huge impact on site operations with nearly half our traffic going down that route now. I took the opportunity at that time to make the donation link to my Rotary Club site simpler and more direct but that has had no noticeable impact except for a few more visits to the Trust Fund page on that site. The remaining Beethoven symphonies were the big arrangement achievement of the year but in the event the Bagatelles, the Moonlight sonata and the Emperor concerto received as many downloads. Beethoven took the top 46 download slots in the last four months and when Google celebrated his anniversary on their search page we had the biggest spike ever - from India and Indonesia to the Beethoven page. But, nothing daunted, to round the year out I have arranged some more ragtime and added some early blues for the first time. I am particularly pleased with the Jelly Roll Morton page which includes some material which I...

Thanks to the half term holiday I have managed to complete the MP3 recordings of the remaining seven Beethoven Symphonies with a few other pieces thrown in for good measure. My source MIDI files, mostly dated 1998, generally sttod up well but there were some issues with the Pastorale and I had to source some newer material where the copyright had still not been claimed. This whole enterprise still feels like outrageous hubris but I can't argue with the taste of my website visitors who consistently download my Beethoven recordings in much higher volumes than anything else. I'll be interested to see if there are any reactions to the final movement of the ninth Symphony where I have used a solo and a chorus of synthetic voices for the four parts. If nothing else it points up the way Beethoven sought to weave the voices in as yet another group of instruments in the structure of the movement. I will publish them in the next few days.

As Beethoven's music is so popular I have decided to tackle the rest of the symphonies. Up to now I have generally avoided slower tempo pieces or movements because they don't responsd so well to a predominatly percussion treatment. But with the arrival of the Gamelan orchestra in my musical palette it is easier to handle slower parts. I also use a cool pad to provide an extended sustain to both steel drum and marimba parts where necessary. However the Chroral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has provided the additional challenge of human voices. There are many vox and chorus pads and I have selected male and female ones from my collection of Mega Mood presets. It's not recorded yet so there is still time for final tweaks but the simmpler arrangment, the absence of the lyrics and the absence of soloists makes the musical form more evident. Nearly 15 years practice with this set of instruments and a variety of source MIDI material has meant that I can get to a...

It's been quite a long break since the last arrangements were made and published. So it was nice to get back to the music again and see what new work can be produced. I use a fairly basic Cubase software package with a Creamware sound card and standard monitor speakers in my office come studio at the bottom of the garden. We have been there for 8 years and it was overdue a tidyup which has improved the acoustics somewhat. As my Beethoven recordings are so popular and the music responds so nicely to my percussion treatment this is where I am concentrating. A sonata, concerto and symphony so far are at the first cut stage - I will leave them to mature for a while before coming back to listen again and make further adjustments and final recordings. I am making more use of the gamelan in some of these arrangements and I have also aquired a nice "Steel Magic" preset instrument to augment my Purity  steel drums. I have had a look at doing some work with jazz to follow o...

During the summer visitor volumes on this site usually decline - a phenomena I have put down to the holidays of college students around the world. This year has been a bit different - the Google searches did decline much as expected but the Twitter campaign carried on regardless and so we continued to download around 200 gig a month. But better than that the daily visits sometimes exceeded 1000 rather than the usual 600 presumably in response to new tweets, new images and variations in the patterns repetition. There are now 112 unique tweets on a seven day cycle and all the YouTube tweets have been replaced. But a few larger daily peaks have been prompted by particularly powerful re-tweets. But my efforts to solicit donations for My Rotary Club's Charitable Trust Fund have been a miserable failure. Nothing daunted I have revamped the donation landing page on my Rotary Club website and I have added a Donate tab to the top navigation bar and I'll start monitoring the traf...

May has seen download volumes of over 200 Gigabits again. It looks as if much of this is in direct response to the tweets although Twitter Analytics doesn't seem to record them as link clicks.  The geographical focus for the site has moved to South East Asia and so I try to time the tweets for early morning here late afternoon / early evening there - not so good for the USA. Some of the re-tweets have produced dramatic i.e. 10 fold daily peaks in impressions. Meanwhile the volume of searches has shown some dramatic surges which are probably linked in some way I have yet to discern. All in all the Twitter campaign is continuing to perform well it is spreading awareness of the less frequently visited corners of the site while booting popularity of the favorites like Beethoven's Symphonies and the Can Can. So we will continue to refine and develop the content and be led by the audience response. My Rotary Club has also received it's first donation from the site so pe...

It takes a little while for every new version of my website to settle down and this was no exception. The software I use these days is very good at handling the graphical presentation of the site but maintaining the links to the content has been more of a knife and fork job i including the use of FTP to get the files in the right folders. So apologies for those 404 errors. There were also a few Mobile errors which Google picked up and I have fixed almost all of those which is handy because according to Google Analytics about 45% of my traffic now comes from mobile devices. The tweeting campaign has actually benefited from Twitter's removal of the edit and re-tweet option as it forced me to organise them in a Word document for the daily cut and paste. As you would expect from repetitive tweeting there is a steady modest response to each tweet presumably from occasional visitors to the various #tag streams I address but occasionally a re-tweet or favourite response will send ...

Wow - good job it was a long weekend so that I could complete the Mobile website update. The software I have been using to design and build the site is not really geared up for even medium sized sites like this one and there is a lot of copy and pasting involved followed by quite a bit of correction especially of download links. On the other hand the graphic design functionality is brilliant and it has been a lot easier to produce a consistently high quality visual image. However the internet does provide some very prompt feedback and Android is now the pre-eminent operating system used by site visitors for the first time.  Some of the download file sizes may be a bit big for some mobile users and we might need to restore file sizes for the mobile version. There are undoubtedly outstanding issues to resolve but I'll get to those in due course. I have taken the opportunity to update some of the text but the basic structure of the site has been retained there is just a mobile...

This month has seen continuing progress with download volumes over 200 gigabits for the first time. Twitter analytics now provides data on the performance of individual tweets.  The links into site pages seem to be ineffective so I have replaced them with repeats of Download2MP3 to see if I can boost the search levels on the brand. Android is the second most poular visitor operating system.  The site redesign with a mobile variant is progressing well but Google's 21st April deadline may be missed because it is more important to get all the details right than miss a bit of traffic. Responses to donation requests are now being forwarded directly to my Rotary club donate page for online processing but no noticeable change yet. An example of the need to get things right - in the website redesign process I noticed that I had overlooked the Rachmaninoff page which has some beautiful new arrangements. As there were no links to it there had been no visits or downloads but a n...