penmachine.comments (all fields optional!)
Following are comments about the CD of my music I'm compiling, and may even sell. I'm also considering including a bonus data DVD at no extra charge, which would have pre-ripped MP3, AAC, Ogg, and WMA versions of the songs, uncompressed AIFF audio versions, and maybe some additional bonus material like uncompleted demos, promos, and maybe a bit of video.
You might want to consider packaging both Audacity and the individual tracks as Audacity packages. Audacity runs on Mac, Win and Linux so you'd have the widest possible reach.
Good Luck,
Mike Buckbee
http://www.feed-mail.com/
http:/www.buzzwordcompliant.net/
I think it's a good idea,. My thought would be to have two products, the CD and the DVD. Each would be priced separately. Don't underestimate the value of your product what ever it may be. I've know people that underpriced their products thinking that cheap sells more. Once they raised their price to the market they began to get more orders.
Michael, great idea. Many might not take advantage of it, but encouraging people to try out audio editing would make it worth including the Win, Mac, and Linux distributions of Audacity on the DVD if there's space.
Jim, you make a good point, but I'm not suggesting that I would underprice the package (I'd likely charge the standard $12-15 per CD), and include both discs in a single jewel box, but my whole point here is that the audio CD by itself doesn't provide a lot of additional value over the MP3s already available in my podcast and on my website. I'm not exactly a well known artist (or known at all, really). So, for me, the data DVD would be, (a) a bonus to those who would have bought the CD anyway, and (b) an incentive for those who might otherwise just download the free versions.
My thought is that what makes it especially worthwhile is that none of the DVD material would be necessary to enjoy things, but it's fun and useful, and also sufficiently data heavy (uncompressed audio, applications, multiple versions of compressed audio, etc.) that it wouldn't be possible for me to offer on the Web without incurring big bandwidth and hosting charges -- aside from the fact that many people couldn't take the time to download it anyway.
At its simplest, the DVD would contain material I already have, so the incremental cost in my time and materials (basically just the blank DVDs) is relatively trivial. And charging separately for the two discs is also very much the traditional way of doing this sort of thing (what a record company might consider "innovative," but isn't from a pricing perspective), and also awkward for me to deal with -- if I only have one product, it's simple both for buyers and for me.
Again, it's an experiment in seeing whether offering bonus material is a good way to market music in physical form. In the bigger industry, it's the sort of thing record companies should be trying (and, in some cases, are doing with bonus video DVDs with albums). There's likely to be a market at both ends: single purchases as from the iTunes store, and full-album purchases for bonus material. I don't think the standalone audio CD market is going to survive, so I'd like to try to be a little ahead of the game.
Does anyone have any further ideas for interesting stuff to include on the DVD (or on the CD, for that matter?).
I am apart of an Indie group and I am very much for getting our music heard but yet apprehensive about this site(no offense). Are you certain that I am actually going to be getting in touch with the people from CBC? I find the site to be a real good place to start, but like I said previously, I need to be re-a sured that this is real.
Also, do you happen to know the total pricing to getting our music airplay?
I'm not sure I understand you -- I'm talking about submitting music to be heard on CBC public radio. There's no charge for that. And I'm sure things have changed since 2005. Check out the CBC Radio 3 podcast submission guidelines, for instance. It didn't even exist then:
radio3.cbc.ca/nmc/help.aspx
Commenting by HaloScan
