Another title change?? This one, again, seems totally inappropriate - shouldn't "Show HN" posts be exempt from mods changing the title since one would imagine that the creator of what is being shown has a better idea of an appropriate title than a mod? Seems to me like its one step away from editing the very content being linked!
Please charge more. My current (indy) project just selected the stock music for our project. I'm happy to pay $30 / piece. The site that we licensed our music from had pricing options as well. E.g. $30 for the full track, down to as low as $7 for a short loop or a stinger.
Also if you can make it easier to find what I'm looking for then I'll look first at your site rather than others. E.g. is the piece fast/slow tempo, instruments used, genre or style, etc.
Consider making some tracks free to use and share (with your name and contact info and "I make music for money for you" being mandatory to be kept). You can use a creative commons license for that. I haven't listened yet but doing this might mean ending up in free/open-source games and thus maybe being bundled into linux distributions. Great free advertising.
My uninformed guess is that you can charge substantially more than this and still provide great value. Consider that $5 is about the cost of four minutes of programmer time.
Yeah, he could most likely get away with charging higher. How do you suggest a company test out pricing though? I mean I think that's exactly what Amazon has done and they get criticized for doing so (since they do it in a A/B fashion)
I guess he could just bump all the songs to $10 and see if sales increase/decrease/etc over a period of time. Pricing is definitely an interesting problem, for all startups.
The website could use some optimization but it's a great start. I like the music that you've posted so far. One question, though: Would you consider doing short musical sound effects ("jingles" for lack of a better word)? For example, for level-ups or small achievements within a game. A lot of music is available for games but it seems tough to find decent-sounding musical effects that can be used in this way.
That's actually on my to-do list. I want to create a series of shorter "jingles" that can be packaged and sold as bundles in various styles (so you'd have a more orchestral set, an electronic set, etc). It's definitely something I want to have available sooner than later.
A lot of the commenters here think you're charging too little and I agree.
Have you thought about having two pricing tiers: one for non-exclusive use and much higher one (maybe $100 per track?) for exclusive use?
If I were a game developer and I thought I was making the next Angry Birds, having a recognizable theme that I knew no one else would have would be an easy to understand added value.
> Have you thought about having two pricing tiers: one for non-exclusive use and much higher one (maybe $100 per track?) for exclusive use?
I think you've vastly underestimated a reasonable price for exclusive use, given the inability to sell it to anyone else, the amount of time needed to produce an original piece of music, and any sensible salary for individual composers.
Since my day job involves working with composers as they record original works, I know $100 per track is very low considering the time/creativity/experience required.
However, I respect that different people are at different stages in their careers. This may be a rung on the ladder on the way to commissions or a side project while in school.
I was simply taking the current price of $5 per track and thinking that it may be unlikely for any given track to be licensed by twenty different game developers for non-exclusive use. It might yield more revenue to have one buyer at $100 per track.
I second the idea of the non-exclusive/exclusive price tiers. I would also suggest relating pieces with one another when they might make sense as a suite (i.e. same genere, thematically similar, techno vs. orchestral, etc.)
I don't have hard numbers but given the popularity of web and mobile game engines, like Unity3D, there are numerous people entering the game development space. Music seems to be one of the most often requested areas and most indie devs either try to make it themselves or buy really crappy music. I figure I can offer them affordable yet high-quality music. I've been talking to a handful of social/mobile studios as well and have some ideas on how I'm going to change the business model to support them.
Very cool resource and there are some great tracks here. I'm excited to see how you expand the library to accompany all kinds of different projects, even beyond games.
I'm quite a fan of royalty-free music, actually I just finished up a project using 100% royalty-free music from Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com/). He uses a creative-commons license for all of his work, but makes the bulk of his money through private projects brought on from exposure.
Our project was for an immersive reading experience for The War of the Worlds, which meant we needed lots and lots of different types of music for all the story arcs. Shameless plug if you want to check it out: http://e-mersiv.com/apps
Again, I think you could definitely have a market for more than just game devs out there, your pricing model is attractive enough to be used for short videos, ebooks, etc.
I'm currently working on an indie game that we hope to release within 6 months or so. Sound effects we were pretty sure we could handle, but music is another thing altogether. From what I can see here, this fits the bill very well - the music is appealing and generic enough to be put in numerous types of games, yet not so generic as to be devoid of the ability to set a mood. I like it a lot.
Also, I do agree with some of the other posters - you should charge a bit more. Seems like a steal at $5.00.
Have you considered allowing 'library license' purchases, where you pay a bit more than list but get access to the entire library and future releases as well?
As an aside, I am getting a lot of 'File Not Found'.
I couldn't browse at all - kept getting knocked back the loading bar. I'm using Firefox on linux. As others have said already, I'd suggest making a javascript-free version for people like me who aren't able to listen for whatever reason (and I see quicktime mentioned on the page - please please no quicktime, I refuse to install it).
For my purposes, a plain HTML page with download links to a low quality sample for me to listen to would be enough. (and obviously a shopping cart or some other way to buy the full quality versions)
Having said that, I love the idea and hope I can listen to some of your music soon.
As a musician and former gamer, I think this is a great idea and interesting discussion about pricing and business models. Have you thought about a commission/share model? I don't know the real market, but I think most musicians won't think about the games industry as a business, so you have probably less competition there. On the other hand, lately I've seen more and more indie games, so demand seems to be growing.
With such a low price, I'll have my concerns with the lack of exclusivity. Maybe you could add a premium price to remove the audio from further selling?
I have a custom audio service on the site as well which I recommend for people seeking exclusivity and the more traditional commission approach. The prices are still lower than most composers can offer, but they're obviously a good deal higher than what I can offer for the non exclusive library tracks.
I've also considered the buyout approach for the library, and it's something I may eventually include.
Great idea! One recommendation: Currently, your site loads a complete instance of the audio player for each track, which causes Flash's memory usage to shoot up by a couple hundred MB (Chrome on Windows). Might I suggest something like Yahoo's WebPlayer instead? It handles long lists of audio files more gracefully, with a single Flash object. That alone should greatly impact your page load times and responsiveness.
Bookmarked it. I understand that you're a musician, and that's why you decided to start with music, but do you guys have any future plans of also providing other resources, such as sprite sheets, and that sort of stuff? This site has a great potential of being a one place stop for indie developers to help them get started.
Especially, do you offer a MOD formats (1) or only streamed audio? Because better games prefer to sync with the engine, and separate spacial tracks with OpenAL.
This is a great idea! One of the bigger stumbling blocks for me, as a hopeful one-man-studio, is that I am crap at making music. This could be the answer to that. Best of luck to you!
I am a hobbyist game developer, and this seems like a good resource (I have bookmarked it). Do you compose all the music or take in tracks from others as well?
I compose all of the music at the moment, but as the business grows I would like to potentially bring in other composers and sound effect artists to offer a wider selection of styles.
Yeah, the website could definitely use some improvement. Revenue is trickling in currently, hoping I can contract someone to spruce it up. I've been told HTML5 audio players would make a big difference in loading speed.
and you are definitely not good at human interactions. the website might not be great but there is worse and also i am not paying for the website but for the music, which is actually great
