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Hi, zircon here. I'm one of the musicians involved with the Game Music Bundle (Return All Robots! OST, Antigravity). Let me see if I can answer your questions.

Hi, zircon here. I'm one of the musicians involved with the Game Music Bundle (Return All Robots! OST, Antigravity). Let me see if I can answer your questions. 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.

wbhart 15y ago
Hi Zircon, thanks for those answers! I do think that some of that information could be woven into your main page without raising the complexity of the page substantively. But of course those were all just questions that immediately rushed into my head when I first saw the page. Of course, I may not be typical of average customers. 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.
ramidarigaz 15y ago
Slightly off topic, but I'm a huge fan of your music!
raoulette 15y ago
I would certainly not buy music if I can't listen to it first, so I looked for a way to listen to samples or something and found the same "looks like a play button but really an image" everywhere. 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 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).

wbhart 15y ago

Hi Zircon, thanks for those answers! I do think that some of that information could be woven into your main page without raising the complexity of the page substantively. But of course those were all just questions that immediately rushed into my head when I first saw the page. Of course, I may not be typical of average customers. 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.

ramidarigaz 15y ago

Slightly off topic, but I'm a huge fan of your music!

raoulette 15y ago

I would certainly not buy music if I can't listen to it first, so I looked for a way to listen to samples or something and found the same "looks like a play button but really an image" everywhere. 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 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).