Intercontinental Music Lab

It’s just been announced that the next Intercontinental Music Lab album will be Mysteries of the Unexplained exploring strange and paranormal phenomena… see the new blog for the latest news.

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Ancient Greeks & Circus Freaks has now been released. Just in time to light up your Christmas Tree with musical tales like you’ve never heard before. One of the things I’ve started doing having released new albums is looking at the stats of how many people have been downloading them and where they come from. I’ve mentioned Mininova before where you can download all of our albums for free. I’ve now set up a monitoring thing in Yahoo Pipes which counts how many times our stuff has been downloaded. I haven’t got it to add everything up yet but you can do that right? So here is my album downloader counter thingammy (at the moment it only counts downloads from Mininova, we have about 15,000 other downloads elsewhere):

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Peer to peer sharing of music is killing the record industry and making it impossible for new acts to get any kind of exposure or help. That’s not quoting Lily Allen but that was the crux of her attack on music piracy. Peer to peer sharing of music enabled 60,000 copies of our albums to be downloaded in under a month. I’d like to see a record company sell that many copies of one of our excellent CDs with a zero budget.

We’ve been giving our music away for free for over a year now, and been having great fun doing so. We’ve made new friends, pushed ourselves creatively, and haven’t ended up out of pocket (unlike a lot of touring signed bands).

We were doing quite well distributing MP3s on our site as a downloadable zip file, and some lossless versions of the albums via Mediafire. Then Zorlin-cc started seeding our stuff on Mininova. Mininova is/was a very popular site for picking up torrent files. Torrent files facilitate the peer to peer sharing of files, distributing the bandwidth of downloading amongst users rather than just the creators of the files. Anyway, on the 26th November Mininova was taken to court and forced to remove all the illegal content from its servers. Leaving just the legal stuff. Suddenly our albums became needles in not such a big haystack and bingo, thousands of new people discovered our music.

So peer to peer can help independent bands distribute their music, as can Jamendo, Last.FM, and begrudgingly MySpace (I say begrudgingly because I’m not sure MySpace has been particularly creative with its offering). OK, we’re not trying to make money from the Intercontinental Music Lab so we can increase downloads.

So how do you make a living out of writing and distributing music via Creative Commons licenses? We could look into it, but what would do with the cash? There are now about 30 people in the band, people who write what they want, or decide not to if they’ve got other commitments, and there’s no pressure.

I’ve got to go to bed now. Sorry if that was all a bit incoherent, I do have a cold you see.

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creative commons

OK so we’re making baby steps but the core content of the website has now been pulled over to this new site. It’s already proving a lot easier to maintain and customise so we’re really going to be able to start doing some more groovy things now.

I’ve added in some nice huge images for the albums. It always seemed a shame that all that lovely artwork was just shown off as smallish thumbnail so now they’re big and brash.

Sorting out the theming has been a lot easier this time round as the guy who put together the Wordpress theme lets you download his original PSD file for modding. What a nice chap. Very much in keeping with IML philosphy as well (though we’d rather you didn’t cut our music up, you are welcome to lay it over the top of videos, podcast it, just don’t try and make any money out of it alright).

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website

We’ve been using Drupal for almost a year now and although it’s been quite flexible with regards to how we build our site, we ended up using lots of custom components, which haven’t been able to keep up with Drupal core updates. This has resulted in the site breaking quite regularly. So we’re decamping to a generic install of Wordpress and wringing everything we can out of it. So far so good. We’re just copying and pasting all of our old content across then we’re going to look into how we can get songs and aritsts linking into each other intelligently. Also going to rethink the style with an emphasis on ease of navigation rather than giant splodges everywhere.

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