Instrumental Music

Tidying up the site

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:45:26 PDT

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 sorting techniques to check the integrity of the application of the pricing policy. The first paying customer has now ventured in and all seems to be well.

First New Price Structure since 2004

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:12:02 PDT

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$(US)
<3 minutes 0.29$(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.

14 New Mozart Recordings

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:26:16 PDT

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 movements we have recorded stand up on their own.

We haven't decided where to go next on the recording front and there is more work to be done on the web site and the commercial side of things.

The new sample player technology seems to be working well and with that and the new hifi samples we have doubled the volume of download data from the site every day and after a somewhat sticky period our advertising revenue has picked up again.

Google Rankings Churn

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:38:33 PST

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 copyright.)

This illustrates the turbulance over the last few days. We are not seeing much back wash in our little corners but it keeps you on your toes.

Our lack of activity on the site for a long time followed by a lot of changes in a short time also seems to be having little effect on rankings and traffic but sometimes that takes a kittle longer to come through.

Player Effects

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:52:19 PST

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.

Settling Down

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:57:38 PST

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 audience for our music.

We're Back with the Symphonies

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:07:22 PST

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 did last spring the shop has been working well - so all is ready - come and buy!

Return to the Blog

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:05:19 PDT

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...

Shop Re-opens

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:12:32 PST

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.

Just a little surge

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:39:13 PST

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 possibly by playing them one after another off the same page.

The threat of the record companies coming in and trying to supplant the iTunes business model is something we need to take seriously and develop a response. Fortunately we already know a bit about making advertising work with our music but we will have to ramp up our game to respond to them.

AdSense is back - up and running on the site

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:12:00 PST

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.

A New Year Dawns

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:05:12 PST

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.

Danse Macabre

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:04:07 PDT

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.

SERPs Churn dies down again

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:49:21 PDT

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.

Google Flux Continues

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:26:12 PDT

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.

Google SERPs Change Surge

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:41:17 PDT

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.

Now here's a funny thing!

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:08:01 PDT

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 digital recording quality is binary i.e. it is either there or it isn't. Drop outs, delays and distortion can occur with players but the original material that leaves our computers here should arrive in pristine form with the customer. Never the less I emailed a copy back to Australia and this morning I open my mail to find that this copy burned perfectly.

If anyone can suggest why I'd be very interested to hear from them.

July Best month yet

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:08:34 PDT

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 not all of this month in North America and Europe so we are looking forward to things picking up again in September.

Yesterday this computer hung after the restart following the latest Microsoft update - it only took a few hours to follow the Dell troubleshooting pages on the laptop and roll back to Wednesday. Now we are not sure if it was that update or the Trojan which Zone Alarm quarantined this morning. Still it is the first time we have had to use the restore facility on XP and it appears to work really well once you can find it.

Google SERPs Spike - More & More Churn

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 23:58:22 PDT

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.

AdSense - a couple of months in

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:11:27 PDT

As I have mentioned before Google's contract is a bit restrictive in terms of what can be disclosed about the arrangement.

But I think a few comments are justified, although of course, they are personal comments based on the experience of just one site.

From our first toe in the water experiments with individual ads on some pages we have in the last day or so moved to maximizing the advertising coverage where that can be done without compromising important page layout considerations. So apart from this blog we don't use the top of the page. We do use the right hand side where it doesn't interfere with our own product tables.

If there is space at the end of our text we include the 'fat one' otherwise a single banner has been placed at the bottom of most product pages and all the streaming sample pages. We have even added the banner ads to our product pages in the shop below the action buttons because we know people do sit and listen to these samples for up to 30 seconds and then sometimes listen again. There also seem to be a few individuals who come and listen to lots of samples, occasionally over several days.

As you would expect Google's monitoring stats are pretty good although some of the more sophisticated aspects take a bit of getting used to. Through this we are seeing our advertising income rise steadily without any negative impact on our own sales - there could even be a small positive impact.

To conclude this has been a very positive and interesting experience so far, despite the mysterious process by which our actual remuneration is determined and the stochastic visitor behavior with their decisions to click or not to click.

Unprecedented Visitor Levels

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 01:11:24 PDT

Well, our last post was not far off the mark - those levels of visits were sustained making June a record month and have in the last few days have been surpassed.

The keyword re-focus and bounce reduction initiatives really appear to be paying off although there is still a lot of turbulence on individual keywords. Encouragingly buying behavior seems to be following the visitor activity and the e-commerce side of the site is functioning really well now.

We are planning to move home soon and there will be some disruption to the creative side of the business while we get settled in. But we are going to take the opportunity to upgrade some of our equipment and possibly software before we produce more recordings.

The dual processor PCs are looking very good value now and the 100% increase in memory, not to mention the large caches should mean that we will not hit processor constraints with our instrument emulation software as often as we do now.

Visitor growth at last!

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 03:53:30 PDT

It is always a tricky decision to announce an increase in visitor numbers because they can fall away again so easily but this follows the biggest upheaval in Google SERPs for more than 6 months and a recent pick up in Googlebot activity on the site. Over the last three days we have seen a 25% increase to levels that we have hardly ever seen before.

So it is fingers and toes crossed that the work we have done on the site has brought us to a new plateau and that we have a firm foundation for the next set of refinements and further growth.

Of course we now have the extra potential benefit from increased visitor numbers in the pay per clicks on our Google Ads because we are looking to strengthen and refine that activity too.

We started on this refinement phase activity months ago and this just demonstrates how patient you have to be in this game.

Bounce Research Findings

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:04:55 PDT

Today I came across one of those gems which makes the whole business of optimising site for Google so worthwhile.

As someone who was trained in science and sought to apply it in a marketing environment over many years with huge budgets it is so nice to be able to appreciate the efforts of those who experiment on Google with the help of a few acquaintances and get results.

As you know we have been concerned about the bounce rates on some of our pages and have taken action to reduce it, with some modest success. It had occurred to me that Google might be using this information to improve the search results for searchers on the assumption that bounces are a bad thing and that might harm our rankings.

In the experiment reported in this article they seem to have proved that this is the case - so we can start to see why Google Analytics would be free to webmasters. I'm so impressed I signed up for their newsletter at www.1stsearchenginerankings.com and I'll flag items of interest here.

In the meantime our keyword results are churning away following the recent spikes of SERPs churn but the overall level of visits is pretty stable and we are strengthening our Google Ads activity because that doesn't seem to be doing any harm to our sales activity levels and is developing a steady trickle of pennies.

Now it is five Rankpulse Google SERPs spikes in a week!

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Thu, 31 May 2007 01:31:56 PDT

This kind of churn really is unprecedented - but still no comment on the forum.

Here is a chart from www.rankpulse.com of the top ten positions for ten sites up to yesterday:

The blur over the last few days illustrates what is happening to the relative positions of these sites in the Google Search Engine Results Positions (SERPS). While the top two sites have managed to stay above the fray everyone else has been engulfed.

And that is just how we feel at the moment - well and truly engulfed!

But you can also see that former number 1's have disappeared completely from the top ten chart but that the recent movement mostly revolves around sites that have been there or there abouts in recent time.

Third Spike on Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (www.download2mp3.com) — Mon, 28 May 2007 00:33:49 PDT

It's a very unsual Google update that has just passed by without any comment that I've seen on the forum. Major spikes have been recorded on RankPulse's measure of Google SERP's change on three days with one quiet day between them is I believe unprecedented. With so many differnt keyword contributing to our visitor numbers it is impossible for us to discern any significant imapcts in the short term.

Overall it looks as if May will pull us back to our January visitor levels but of course our shop is working properly now so we may see a bit more business out of it.

The number of people who come to listen to a short sample of our version of Widor's famous Toccatta without purchasing the whole thing is quite extraordinary.