Phonocratic Records

We’re celebrating one year with the new site at www.phonocratic.com! Sadly, there is not much other news. Lost Shadow is currently working in the studio on songs for the new album, hopefully to be released later this year. Stay tuned!

Please note that orders placed between March 25 and April 9 will not be shipped until April 12 because of the Easter holidays. If you want to receive your order before April 12, make your purchases BEFORE March 25. Orders can be placed at our Bandcamp Store.

As observant visitors might have noticed, it is no longer possible to download all Lost Shadow songs for free at Last.fm. This is an intentional move from Phonocratic Records, where we instead hope to redirect our listeners to either Last.fm’s streaming services, or our new Lost Shadow music and store site at Bandcamp. Through our Bandcamp Store (and Last.fm) streaming of all Lost Shadow songs will still be available for free. Additionally, all Lost Shadow albums since 2006 will be available for free or cheap download from Bandcamp, where physical CDs also can be bought.

Why not free downloads?
Why are we making these changes? Well, it turns out that our experiment with free downloads and donations did not yield the effect we had hoped. Last year Phonocratic Records was run at personal economical loss, and we have no reason to expect that this will change in the near future without taking any action. Still, we believe that there is value in the music we make available, so we will try another marketing model, using downloads and micropayments. Last.fm does not serve this purpose very well, while Bandcamp turns out to be a great place to securely sell music downloads (and physical albums). It will still be possible to donate to Lost Shadow through the Store, but we suggest that our listeners instead download the high-quality music files from Bandcamp, and make the small micropayments there. Hey, 3 euros for a 12 song album is about as cheap as a cup of coffee! And it’s even cheaper than a beer!

Remaining free
A number of tracks will remain free. These are:

• Songs from albums released before 2006. These albums will not be made available through Bandcamp, and will therefore remain downloadable from Last.fm for free (still at only 128kps, though).
• All Lost Shadow singles, previous ones, and coming ones. However, only the lead tracks might be made available for free download in some instances. The singles will be downloadable as 128kps mp3 from Last.fm, or in a variety of  high-quality formats from Bandcamp. Regardless of format, the files will be free.
• Selected albums and songs, such as the “Age and Time” album released last year.

Also, free steaming of all songs is available from both Last.fm and Bandcamp.

No more physical singles
As mentioned at the release of the A Nuance of Future single, we will not continue to release singles in physical format. This is also part of the new strategy for Phonocratic Records. We feel both sad and excited about this decision. The good thing is that we can now focus on bringing you the best possible digital experience for the singles. Also, it should be noted that our albums will still be available in physical CD format, as well as in digital download form, and we do not plan to change that.

We hope that our listeners will be positive about these changes and that we’re putting the value back behind the music.

We have had some problems with the new release Age and Time on last.fm. Since I used the same names for the tracks on Age and Time as for the previous versions on older albums, some old tracks got replaced by new ones (obviously you are only allowed to use a track name once). I have been working hard to fix the problem this morning, and all old tracks should be back sometime today (please be patient). The tracks on Age and Time have now a “2009″-suffix added to them, to distinguish them from the old tracks. However, they are exactly the same audio recordings as on the release yesterday. Age and Time can be downloaded from http://www.last.fm/music/Lost+Shadow/Age+and+Time.

[Update 16.17]: We still have problems with the old tracks at last.fm. I am working on it, but don’t expect the old versions of the tracks to be back until tomorrow, or maybe even after this weekend. Please have patience. The new tracks from Age and Time seems to be fully listenable and downloadable though, so you can enjoy these in the meantime.

[Update 20 nov]: The problems seems to be fixed now. All albums should work as normal (that is, you should be able to download and listen all Lost Shadow songs from last.fm). If you experience problems or errors, then please comment on this post.

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