Heyo, life has been stupid lately, but I thought I’d pop in and give a quick update on some things I’ve been up to.
First of all, CD-Trip is now public on YouTube, so feel free to watch it (if you haven’t already)!
The other big thing I’m working on is a new and improved online store. It’s not quite ready yet, but it’s going to have a whole bunch of new products like CDs, CD-Trip Bootleg VHS, and zines. Most complicatedly I’m going to start offering digital downloads – of films and music.
I’ve been thinking about setting something like this up for a while, and all of the news surrounding Bandcamp’s various takeovers has only served to motivate me further. Also while Bandcamp is pretty great for music, but I can’t find a suitable equivalent for film. Vimeo offers the ability to offer rentals and downloads but it is prohibitively expensive. For a small time indie like me, it would be ideal to pay for file hosting depending on how much things get downloaded, not a big flat monthly rate. So after much research I think I’ve got it figured out. I’m to host files on Google Cloud Storage – I’m not necessarily a fan of supporting the tech giants, but at least it’s not Amazon and it’s going to cost me next to nothing.
Will these digital downloads be of interest to people? Time will tell, but it seems irresponsible of me not to have them somewhere as an option. I know most people stream music from Spotify and stream videos from Youtube, etc. but thinking long-term, I think it’s important that there’s an option to purchase directly from the artist and have the media to hoard forever!
My plan right now is to offer mp3 and flac audio, h264-encoded mp4 videos, and as much bonus material as I can come up with. I might think about some sort of video rental system later, but video rentals for short films seems a bit ridiculous. Anyway, should be ready soon, and we’ll see how it all goes!