everything is now free

alright, the verdict is finally in on my months-long experiment offering higher-quality mp3′s for sale on this site, and it’s a failure. I’ve taken down the online store for good and just posted up a donation button on the mp3 page. the good news is that since i moved all my albums to Jamendo I no longer have to pay for bandwidth to let ya’ll download them, so that eliminates one of the big costs that moved me to add for-sale mp3′s in the first place.

I’ve also added a player/download widget on the MP3 page for the new Beltaine’s Fire album, which is now also free.

I haven’t felt much like writing on this blog lately, been putting most of my writing time into working on new lyrics for the new Beltaine’s Fire album. We’re going into the studio to start recording it on March 16th and I still need to put a bit more polish on some of our new songs. Good times! If you absolutely can’t wait for some more of my writing or just have lots of time to waste, I did post up a new article on CelticAnarchy.org yesterday, prompted partly by the recent events in Kosovo. I’ll have more new stuff up here sooner or later. Probably sooner. We’ll see.

Posted: February 21st, 2008 under news.
Comments: 2

Comments

Comment from Switch
Time: February 28, 2008, 10:42 pm

So Lynx, does that mean we’ll no longer be able to buy printed CDs from you as well? I was planning on it, but I haven’t had a secure Internet connection in recent months. It looks like there’ll be a donation instead in the close future.

Comment from lynx
Time: February 29, 2008, 3:20 pm

yeah, no more physical cd’s. seriously though, in the past year maybe 4 people have bought physical cd’s through this website and that many again have bought high-quality mp3 downloads. compare that to several hundred free mp3 downloads and the thousands of downloads i was getting before i started charging and i figured it was time to read the writing on the wall. It’s just not worth the time to set up and maintain a store that no one buys from.

part of the reason that sales just aren’t happening is that very few people are going to buy something they can get for free. And, in all honesty, part of it is the fact that the recording and mixing quality on these albums is really kind of shitty. It’s light years ahead of my first two albums, but still nowhere near where I want it to be. It’s just plain difficult to make music sound studio quality when it’s recorded at home without dropping thousands of dollars i don’t have on gear, so instead i’ve gone the more diy/punk route and just put it out as is, and hoped people would look past the imperfections in the presentation and feel the content.

for future projects though that just isn’t going to cut it so my big goal now is to find a better way to do my recording so it sounds pro. When i get to that place I’ll probably take all these old mp3s down, same as I took down Soundtrack. In the meantime I’ve left them up and made them free as a motivator to myself and so that folks like you that are down to look past the imperfections and show some support can still get ‘em.

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