I was expecting that translating the recordings on Ambisonia would lead to at least a trippling of downloads. It hasn’t. Some tunes have been downloaded as many times in DTS as *.amb, a few have slightly more DTS downloads, but for the most part, there are still more *.amb downloads than DTS downloads.
Which is interesting!
This failure of DTS will be in part because the DTS downloads don’t appear instantly. I have to translate them manually…. and I simply cant.
…but I’d say its also because there are multiple steps between ‘deciding to download’ and actually ‘hearing ambisonics’. This is what I want to resolve.
I think this is a typical technology uptake challenge. The first challenge was having lots of work centralised in one location. We have that now. There is lots of great material, and it is somewhat accessible … but its just not accessible easily enough. AAC or AC3 (or perhaps both) should dramatically decrease the barrier to entry… whether that has a volume inpact or not … we will see (after the uploader is done).
2 responses so far ↓
Henry Myers // June 17, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Hi Etienne:
I don’t think that the format makes as much of a difference as “finding” your site. I found you a couple of years ago in a moment of boredom to see if anything was still happening in ambisonics. I knew about Ambisonics from the 70s; few younger people or people who where not involved in quad know about it.
My suggestion remains that you (and the group of great musicians and recordists) on your site need to be more viral.
If folk with ambisonic recording equipment recorded community and university concerts, while getting a listing in the program or giving out cards linking the recorded file to ambisonia, you might get more hits. Also if you can get universities and community concert organizers to put sample dts files on their web site (through a link to ambisonia), you would have another conduit to motivated eyeballs.
Henry
Etienne Deleflie // June 24, 2008 at 5:43 am
Hi Henry,
The traffic statistics on Ambisonia.com show that a lot of new people do come to the site. Around 60% of visits are people who have never visited the site before (that’s around 1100 newcomers per month).
The bulk of people who happen on the site dont come back. I think having playback directly out of the browser should increase “stickyness”.
But your suggestion of having people record concerts and upload them to the site is actually what I am aiming for. That way … there is a ‘bond’ between someone going to the site and the content on there (it is _their_ content that they want to listen to). This would make sure people go to far greater effort to listen to the work (they will install bittorrent, burn DTS to CD etc.).
As ever, the design of Ambisonia.com (and the user experiences it offers) are far more advanced/sophisticated “in design” than they are online. The challenge is finding the time/money to implement the design… “making is happen” so to speak … “delivering” … “producing” … “getting it out”. that’s what’s been batting me over the head for almost a year now.
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