Indie Game Music Bundle (Pay what you want)
indiemusicbundle.com
indiemusicbundle.com
I don't think the developers would want the music for their games (e.g. Super Meat Boy) used in other games, especially if they paid for an original composition, because it would dilute their brand.
I don't know what license terms the parties agreed to, though, but it's either up to the developer or the music artist. Either way it would be fairly complicated to bundle - I'm pretty sure the license terms wouldn't be the same for all parties.
edit: Nevermind, it's Minecraft.
- $1 - $9.99 gets you 10 albums.
- $10+ gets you 17 albums.
- Each album must downloaded separately as a zip file.
- Four simultaneous downloads allowed, max.
- I'm averaging ~100KB/s per download.
- I've seen file sizes between 60MB - 400MB.What are the stats on what other people have been paying, or am I the only person who is going to go for this? Also, why is it a "holiday sale"? Have you been offering this bundle before? If not, that doesn't make sense. Of course you don't need a reason to have a sale, but currently you aren't marketing your sale. You are just saying "sale". You also basically fix a price in the minds of most customers, 10 albums for $1 and 17 albums for $10. The second looks like bad value against the first. Why even suggest a price? Is there any reason for a limit of $1? Do you trust your customers that little? Or is that the PayPal minimum or something. And what is a "game album"? I've never heard of such a thing before. I don't know if I want to buy such a thing or not. And where can I get a sample? And what is the license on these? Also, a little bit of information on where exactly these game albums come from or what technology was used to create them, or something about their provenance would help. How do we even know that you aren't selling someone else's albums that can be found for free on the web somewhere else? Why are we paying you for them?
1. We will probably release more detailed stats once the sale is over, but as of earlier today we've sold over 9,000 bundles.
2. It's a holiday sale because Black Friday through Cyber Monday is a popular time for there to be sales on things, especially digital items.
3. We have not offered this sale before. To our knowledge, there hasn't been a sale on a collection of game music like this before at all.
4. We are marketing the sale - not just by encouraging sharing on sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, but also news stories on gaming websites like Kotaku, Joystiq, 1up, RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, etc.
5. The deal is indeed 'pay what you want', a very successful model used by the Humble Indie Bundle (all video games), for example, as well as other musicians like Radiohead. It has just never been applied to a group of albums like this, much less game albums.
6. $1 is the minimum due to bandwidth costs and PayPal fees.
7. Most of the albums here are soundtracks to independent video games. They were produced by independent musicians not affiliated with any label. That's what we mean by game albums or game soundtracks. Some of the games are quite popular (Minecraft, Super Meat Boy) while others are a bit more obscure (Return All Robots!) As for whether you would want them and how to get a sample, you can listen to all the music streaming in full by clicking on the album of your choice and then previewing some tracks. Thus, you can decide for yourself if you're interested in at least some of the music.
8. There is no particular license on these. You can listen to them, copy them, send tracks to your friends (though ideally, we would prefer if they got copies too) etc. If you want to use a track from any given album for some kind of commercial project you would of course want to talk to the artist involved with that particular album. Most of us would be cool with any kind of non-commercial usage.
9. As I mentioned, most of the albums consist of music used in various games. So for example, "Minecraft: Volume Alpha" is music from the game Minecraft. A few of them, like "Imposter Nostalgia" and "Antigravity" are simply original albums that are stylistically similar to electronic video game music. In terms of the technology used to create them, it varies greatly depending on the artist. Most of us have personal websites which you can find on the individual album pages, where we describe who we are and what tools we use.
10. Every artist involved has some form of social media presence such as Twitter or Facebook, and has posted about this bundle to their friends, fans and followers. Thus you can verify by viewing these official accounts and their posts endorsing the sale. So, the sale is completely legitimate.
Probably the most important things of that lot are that I suspect that even if you had no lower limit on what people could pay (so long as you suggested no minimum) that the number of people who paid <$1 would be negligible. So I wonder if it is the best use of space to even mention that. If 100 people only paid $0.50 would that actually be a problem? And secondly it isn't immediately 100% clear when you first see the page that you are a consortium of indie musicians. To be honest, I am not sure what the best way is to communicate that fact on the main page. But if you can communicate it, I think it adds value (because you are selling the real deal, art direct from real artists which is actually quite desirable to have) and it stops potential customers wasting their effort on trying to figure that out.
At the end of the day, because you are the first group to do this, you are probably going to get a good response. But next week, when there's 100 knock offs, how will you communicate that you are the real deal and everyone else is just peddling fakes? It's worth thinking about because you have an opportunity to cement a brand. Ideally, what you'd like by next week is for others to find that they can't sell music bundles unless they are you. And this will lead them to come to you to sell their bundles for them. :-)
Best of luck with the sale! I hope it goes really well for you guys. And congrats on being the first to get a music bundle off the ground!
P.S: I just noticed you've given away quite a bit of info on how you put this together, e.g. your platform, payment processor, lists you advertised this on, etc. I would not give this info away. Oh yeah, I figured out how the other bundle group you mentioned got "cred". It's the "donate to the EFF" angle. Hey, if EFF is involved with this, it must be legit. I'm not suggesting you do exactly the same. You have your own niche. BTW, if you do decide to branch out into other genres, I have a well-connected DNB contact for you.
Wondering why someone would put fake "play" button that do nothing at all, apart maybe hurting sales, so I headed to the support page and I was not disappointed to see this http://i.imgur.com/7M1GH.png
How can I trust you with my money when your website doesn't even work properly ? Apart maybe from the part I truly dislike about nowadays web a.k.a. "google spy-alytics" and "we'd like to track your every move outside our networks social buttons".
I don't know why your site is broken, maybe it's because it doesn't like debian linux, maybe it doesn't like opera and iceweasel as browsers, maybe it requires a proprietary plugin I don't have, what I know is that I'm now heading to the closest bittorrent tracker to look for this music.
And sorry but as much as I like to support indie games and music, chances are I'm not coming back to give you any money afterwards mostly out of sheer laziness, but also lack of trust in broken website and refusal to support broken websites.
But I just realized that even I wanted, I can't give you my money as I don't have the required paypal or google account (I do have bitcoins though).
You're complaining because the site doesn't support iceweasel and bitcoin? I'd wager this isn't the first site you've had those issues with.
And no the site does not work at all on any of the computers (linux, mac and windows) and browsers (opera firefox, iron, rekonq, safari) combination I tried. Didn't work on ipad or smartphone either.
The cause of the problem: it requires adobe flash plugin I dont have and fails to make any mention of it or to provide a fallback alternative.
Not that it would be difficult to provide an alternative way to play those mp3 for which you can find the direct link in the source of the page.
When someone wants to give you money and your website or process prevent them from doing so, the only conclusion is that it is badly thought and designed. But only offering support through flash is plain stupid, how can anyone get in touch to tell them about a problem with the flash plugin when this very plugin is required to get support ? Suddenly email and web form are not good enough ?
Honestly, keep your money. I don't think they even want it, $20 bucks says you'll demand a refund right after because you can't grab them in APE or FLAC format anyways. People as picky and demanding as you are never satisfied.
Don't you know that piracy happens mostly because there is no other convenient way to get the content. I'd be happy to give them my money, but there is no way for me to do so.
Turns out all the samples are actually mp3 files (direct links are to be found in the source). These mp3 play fine in my browser, it's only the required use of the flash plugin that prevent me to do so.
Yes I'm part of the estimated 10% of web users that don't have flash installed. Maybe you think that it's good business practice to tell 10% of the potential customer to go fuck themselves, I don't.
I'm not sorry about having ethics and refusing to use paypal or for not wanting google to track me more than they already do by not using their online payment services, it's simply good privacy practice.
Actually they do offer flac which is among why I'm interested in this in the first place, I don't mind paying the extra to get the flac version as my whole music collection is flac only. I simply don't buy mp3.
For you, on your totally atypical setup. Try it on 90% of the worlds machines, "it just works". In other words, demanding perfect support.
> Don't you know that piracy happens mostly because there is no other convenient way to get the content. I'd be happy to give them my money, but there is no way for me to do so.
There are plenty of ways, you are just too much of a stubborn snob to utilize any of them. I fully agree with this argument when there actually is a barrier to entry, but you are just building them instead.
> Maybe you think that it's good business practice to tell 10% of the potential customer to go fuck themselves, I don't.
I do. When they are as picky and demanding as you, in the long run typically they'll cause you more support headaches. Their 10% isn't worth the 20% you lose overall when dealing with their over the top demands.
> I'm not sorry about having ethics and refusing to use paypal or for not wanting google to track me more than they already do by not using their online payment services, it's simply good privacy practice.
Then be ready to repeat this experience with most things on the internet. Your Monopoly money is unproven and highly unstable, only those that haven't thought it through very well or are desperate for cash from security nuts are willing to accept it, and even then they would rather take real currency if you've got it.
> Actually they do offer flac which is among why I'm interested in this in the first place
They didn't when I posted my comment.
> I simply don't buy mp3.
You didn't have to tell me that, it was clear from your original comment that you would never allow anything but FLAC to tarnish your precious ears. Nobody who's as big a snob as you would be caught dead listening to lossy codecs.
Either way, I hope you guys try to score a deal with the Bastion, Machinarium, Shatter, and Nation Red devs, cause those would be pretty cool to see in a bundle.
And if you guys do decide to branch out into other genres, and happen to do a Metal bundle, let me know, cause I'm currently working on a 'Melodic-thrash' Metal album and would love to be a part of it.
I tried mentioning this to the GameMusicBundle Twitter account, but they seemed less than sympathetic and just suggested I contact Danny Baranowsky directly on Twitter. I have done that, but he hasn't responded yet. I just figured there might be other people who noticed the same thing, it would be great if you could mention it too and help me get it fixed.
I probably could live with say 20 downloads in a month (or some timeframe), but this feels very limiting.
"Please only download 4 files at a time or you may be disconnected from the file servers."
The best way to do this would probably be a multi-part rar.
If your torrented video was corrupted, it's because the original file was corrupted. Your torrent client would have thrown away anything that's different from the original.
> The best way to do this would probably be a multi-part rar.
They already offer multiple-file downloads. The compression algorithm isn't going to change the fact that multiple concurrent downloads fail.
As for the file being corrupt, I suspect something else may have been going on, such as bugs with torrent clients. I don't know why the original source file would have been corrupted, as it was supplied by the maker of the film.