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Indie Game Music Bundle (Pay what you want)
- hahla 15y agoBundles, bundles, bundles - I knew this was going to happen sooner or later. I'm actually surprised it took so long.
- ianterrell 15y agoQuite a bit disappointed to realize it wasn't a bundle of music licensed so that you could use it in your indie games. I'd happily pay significantly more than $10 for 17 albums of that.
- fragsworth 15y agoThere are lots of sites that offer the kind of thing you're asking - soundsnap.com is $1/sound, for instance, allowing you to use it royalty free. I don't think the developers would want the music for their games (e.g. Super Meat Boy) used in other games, especially if they paid for an original composition, because it would dilute their brand. I don't know what license terms the parties agreed to, though, but it's either up to the developer or the music artist. Either way it would be fairly complicated to bundle - I'm pretty sure the license terms wouldn't be the same for all parties.
- ido 15y agoDo you know of http://indiegamemusic.com/ http://indiegamemusic.com/ ?
- code_duck 15y agoMakes sense, as one would typically pay a lot more for a license that allows re-use of a copyrighted work in such a way, vs. a typical personal use license.
- petercooper 15y agoBeen enjoying this since last night. Really surprised at the quality. The C418 "72 Minutes of Fame" is essentially a full, high quality instrumental electronic dance album (some of the tracks are very Underworld).
- ralphsaunders 15y agoJust purchased and look forward to listening but requiring me to only download 4 albums at a time is rather poor. "Please only download 4 files at a time or you may be disconnected from the file servers."
- shinratdr 15y agoAlso, you can only download each album 20 times and it shows you a visible count. Not exactly a repressive restriction or anything, just thought I might throw it out there.
- zirconst 15y agoThis is primarily an issue with how Amazon S3 works, unfortunately.
- oblique63 15y agoHave you thought about giving the option to just torrent them? (Like how the HumbleBundle guys do)
- ralphsaunders 15y agoYes, would have much preferred a torrent with a passworded .zip or something similar. Would have been faster too.
- lifeformed 15y agoCouldn't they just zip up all the albums into one file?
- code_duck 15y agoDownloads of one giant file are less reliable - more of a chance someone will download 5GB and then have to start over because of corruption. Torrents aren't much better; I downloaded some 25 GB video of a train in Norway and 90% of it is unviewable. The best way to do this would probably be a multi-part rar.
- wbhart 15y agoThe marketing leaves me with many questions. I suspect this could be a very successful drive if it answered some of those questions. Here are some that spring to my mind: What are the stats on what other people have been paying, or am I the only person who is going to go for this? Also, why is it a "holiday sale"? Have you been offering this bundle before? If not, that doesn't make sense. Of course you don't need a reason to have a sale, but currently you aren't marketing your sale. You are just saying "sale". You also basically fix a price in the minds of most customers, 10 albums for $1 and 17 albums for $10. The second looks like bad value against the first. Why even suggest a price? Is there any reason for a limit of $1? Do you trust your customers that little? Or is that the PayPal minimum or something. And what is a "game album"? I've never heard of such a thing before. I don't know if I want to buy such a thing or not. And where can I get a sample? And what is the license on these? Also, a little bit of information on where exactly these game albums come from or what technology was used to create them, or something about their provenance would help. How do we even know that you aren't selling someone else's albums that can be found for free on the web somewhere else? Why are we paying you for them?
- zirconst 15y agoHi, zircon here. I'm one of the musicians involved with the Game Music Bundle (Return All Robots! OST, Antigravity). Let me see if I can answer your questions. 1. We will probably release more detailed stats once the sale is over, but as of earlier today we've sold over 9,000 bundles. 2. It's a holiday sale because Black Friday through Cyber Monday is a popular time for there to be sales on things, especially digital items. 3. We have not offered this sale before. To our knowledge, there hasn't been a sale on a collection of game music like this before at all. 4. We are marketing the sale - not just by encouraging sharing on sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, but also news stories on gaming websites like Kotaku, Joystiq, 1up, RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, etc. 5. The deal is indeed 'pay what you want', a very successful model used by the Humble Indie Bundle (all video games), for example, as well as other musicians like Radiohead. It has just never been applied to a group of albums like this, much less game albums. 6. $1 is the minimum due to bandwidth costs and PayPal fees. 7. Most of the albums here are soundtracks to independent video games. They were produced by independent musicians not affiliated with any label. That's what we mean by game albums or game soundtracks. Some of the games are quite popular (Minecraft, Super Meat Boy) while others are a bit more obscure (Return All Robots!) As for whether you would want them and how to get a sample, you can listen to all the music streaming in full by clicking on the album of your choice and then previewing some tracks. Thus, you can decide for yourself if you're interested in at least some of the music. 8. There is no particular license on these. You can listen to them, copy them, send tracks to your friends (though ideally, we would prefer if they got copies too) etc. If you want to use a track from any given album for some kind of commercial project you would of course want to talk to the artist involved with that particular album. Most of us would be cool with any kind of non-commercial usage. 9. As I mentioned, most of the albums consist of music used in various games. So for example, "Minecraft: Volume Alpha" is music from the game Minecraft. A few of them, like "Imposter Nostalgia" and "Antigravity" are simply original albums that are stylistically similar to electronic video game music. In terms of the technology used to create them, it varies greatly depending on the artist. Most of us have personal websites which you can find on the individual album pages, where we describe who we are and what tools we use. 10. Every artist involved has some form of social media presence such as Twitter or Facebook, and has posted about this bundle to their friends, fans and followers. Thus you can verify by viewing these official accounts and their posts endorsing the sale. So, the sale is completely legitimate.
- dgallagher 15y agoNice, some new music to hack to for the rest of the day. :) - $1 - $9.99 gets you 10 albums. - $10+ gets you 17 albums. - Each album must downloaded separately as a zip file. - Four simultaneous downloads allowed, max. - I'm averaging ~100KB/s per download. - I've seen file sizes between 60MB - 400MB.
- shinratdr 15y agoSuper Meat Boy soundtrack and the VVVVVV soundtrack? I'm actually more excited about this than the last couple humble bundles I participated in.
- galaktor 15y agoI remember being very close to buying this exact version of the SMB OST a few months ago - it was I think 30 dollars, just that one. This bundle is a dream come true for me right now.
- galaktor 15y agoI do not like the limited amounts of "downloads". I see why it's there (people might share links with friends etc.) but it feels a bit like punishing me because of some cheapskates. Problem is, this does not count "downloads", it counts hits on the download link. Accidentally hit cancel in the save file dialog? Too bad, one "download" wasted. Same thing when I tried to get it from my cell phone (which sucks), it did not work, there went another attempt. I probably could live with say 20 downloads in a month (or some timeframe), but this feels very limiting.
- zirconst 15y agoWe're happy to refresh your count if you run out prematurely. We just have to keep bandwidth costs in mind.
- andrewfelix 15y agoIf you buy one indie game soundtrack buy the Machinarium soundtrack. Insanely good as an album in its own right.
- shocks 15y agoI'm a sucker for these...
- shinratdr 15y agoAnyone else notice that Track 76 of the Super Meat Boy soundtrack seems mangled or cut off? It calls itself an extended cut along with two other tracks, but the other two tracks are 3:20 long, whereas the seemingly cut off "Can o' Salt (Ch 3 Light World Extended Cut)" is only 35 seconds and cuts abruptly at a nonsensical point. I tried mentioning this to the GameMusicBundle Twitter account, but they seemed less than sympathetic and just suggested I contact Danny Baranowsky directly on Twitter. I have done that, but he hasn't responded yet. I just figured there might be other people who noticed the same thing, it would be great if you could mention it too and help me get it fixed.
- galaktor 15y ago4 albums have been added to the pool. I purchased for over $10 yesterday but I don't seem to be able to get those 4 new ones...anybody have success at this yet?