Saturday, October 13, 2007

Babel download site now active

The Babel Label now has its own download site! Music is available as high quality (320Kbps) mp3. A larger proportion of the money comes to us than via Itunes and so it means that we can keep the prices down, distribute more to the musicians per track and reinvest.
Of course, given the efforts that musicians make to produce top quality recordings and packaging, it's a bit of an approximation of the "real thing", as Billy Jenkins has described. "Music has become impotent". Nevertheless, it is essential at least to get such music out in this form.
There are a few intriguing benefits still. First, you can hear samples of all tracks lasting a minute, giving a better flavour of what's to come. Also, we can be really flexible about the timing of what tracks go up, for how long and getting up less widely available music. (A few albums such as those by Steve Arguelles and some of Billy's where I am short of physical stock are up there.) For example, the new Portico Quartet arrived yesterday afternoon and I have already put it on the site!
The full catalogue should be up within the two weeks. Already about half is there. The constraint is time. (It takes around 2 hours to get a complete album up.)
More thoughts about it as time goes on.

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