Phonocratic Records » Site info

One year!

Lost Shadow — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:28:24 +0000

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!

Important Information on Physical CD Orders

Lost Shadow — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:04:21 +0000

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.

Hey, where did the free downloads go?

Lost Shadow — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:01:41 +0000

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.

Some Last.fm problems – fixed

Lost Shadow — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:12:50 +0000

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.

Spam problems

Lost Shadow — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:50:34 +0000

We have had some problems with comment spam (I hope you haven’t noticed, but our servers did). Consequently, you are now required to enter a word from a picture when commenting on posts. Registered users won’t have to do this. If this does not work to solve the problem, we will only open for commenting by registered users, so you might want to register already.

Welcome to Phonocratic Records

Lost Shadow — Tue, 05 May 2009 07:36:46 +0000

Welcome to the new Phonocratic Records site. As you might have noticed, the old site at phonocratic.tk haven’t had any updates this year. That’s because I have silently been moving here to phonocratic.com. At the same time I have shifted the whole site into a wordpress-based publishing system, which means that in the future I can focus on delivering content, not on writing HTML. I think this will turn out to be handy.

I also announce that the Lost Shadow forum will be taken down later this year. It has not been much of a success, and is mostly unused nowadays. As it will be possible to comment on every articles here, the forum’s role seems to have disappeared. I encourage you to discuss the news items posted on phonocratic.com. This site will also have an RSS-feed, so you can keep yourself up to date with Lost Shadow using your favorite RSS-reader.

This new site will focus on Lost Shadow, but also contain material from Avoid, House Mouse, Johan Bengtsson and The Alvedons. Most of the information that was found on the old site has been transferred here, feel free to contact me if there is something you’re missing!

I have also decided to make most of my music available from last.fm. Unfortunately, I cannot upload covers of other artists’ songs, but still there is more than ten albums available that you can download for free. If you like them, please consider a donation or to join the friends of Lost Shadow (can be done in the store).

In a few days a new single will be out, called Pirate Bay, to celebrate this new site. I will soon submit it to last.fm, and will tell you here when it is released. Until then, keep it up, and enjoy the new site!

Welcome to the new store

Lost Shadow — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:43:09 +0000

Welcome to the new Phonocratic Records online store. Here you can support Lost Shadow and Phonocratic Records by giving donations, or by buying CD:s. As you might have noticed, if you visited the old store, many records have been taken out. This is because these records were getting old, and I did not have many of them in stock. Now that they are available for downloading at Last.fm, I didn’t think that it was necessary to supply them in the store anymore. If you are interested in any of these products, please send and e-mail to store[a]phonocratic.com

It will be possible to order every new album that is made available on CD through this store, though it might be more complicated with some items. Please note that there are several pages of items below, and the newest ones appear first.