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Looper's Delight
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Hi Looping Friends, Two weeks ago we were discussing CD release strategies here, so I thought I should post a note that I'm now releasing an album, digitally and for free (optional PayPal support). The link to listen streaming or download the full album in high quality mp3 or Ogg is: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/per.boysen/ Ok, that's it. Now for the report on Jamendo. I chose to work with Jamendo because they utilize P2P distribution and because they harness Creative Commons licensing. --> P2P distribution Any one clicking the "download full album" on the site can choose between BitTorrent of eMule. Since I have Azureus on my Internet Mac I went for the BitTorrent and it started downloading right away (and I can already by now see that my album is downloaded by someone else, since it's starting to upload from my drive). Now, the cool thing with these P2P techniques is that the more people that have the actual files, the faster downloads neewbies will achieve from the site. First only a small directory file (the BitTorrent file) is downloaded and this directory document tells the actual P2P application on the downloaders local machine where to assemble fragments of the original package - from other users all over the net. The Jamendo team in France keeps a bunch of active Torrents for all albums to boost the first downloads, before an album takes on distribution speed by peer to peer gravitation. --> Creative Commons There are links at the site. I've been digging CC for long but until I found out about Jamendo I didn't know any service that in praxis combined CC and P2P. So I feel very much "at home" with this one. How well does it work? You have to upload your mastered album as separate track files with a special JamLoader software provided by Jamendo. I had my songs mastered as 24 bit files and it took a half day to send it all to the server. When it got published I received a very good review from one online listener almost immediately. This listener also notified me that one track was damaged. OH CRAP!!! It all happened so quickly that I had not even had the time to control listen to all tracks online. But this guy were more than correct - in fact two tracks had nasty white noise for several minutes. I had some desperate discussions with the web master and they deleted the bad files while I uploaded them again. It appeared there was always some damage done to one or two files in their automatic server system. Finally we decided that I should delete the complete album and upload it all for a new release. This meant I lost that first very enthusiastic review.... oh well. The second release also came out with some other songs damaged so I deleted it all and did a third try. This time only one song, out of fourteen, was damaged. So I resigned and asked them to delete this bad file on the server and go with only thirteen songs on the album. I have posted about this issue on the Jamendo forum but not yet had any feedback, so I can't say how often that happens. Except for the PayPal donation button on your own artist page (where everything goes to the artist) there are programs for artists to share advertisement revenues made on the entire site. The deal is the same that mp3.com had some five years ago: the label keeps 50 percent and 50 percent is split by all artists that have signed up for the program according to how popular they are, calculated by to the built- in tracking system. There is also a recommendation engine built into the system and listeners are invited to register whatever tag they find accurate for the music. These tags are the basis of the recommendation engine, as far as I understand. Generally I'm getting the impression that these people are doing a good job even on the technical side. All the best Per