| 20 May 2010
In case you hadn't already noticed, we are participating in the Indie Dev Collective sale - which runs from May 18th - May 31st, 2010. Check it out!
I won't get into all the details about the sale, but suffice to say its a collaborative effort by many smaller audio developers - ugo, H.G Fortune, Manytone etc. The gist of it is that if you buy a product from one developer (at a very nice discount!) you get access to more discounts from a variety of other developers. Once again, visit the above link for more info.
Our products that are included in the sale are Viral Outbreak, Pantheon II, OB Resurrection, VS Resurrection and DataBank Two.
This is obviously a bit of a new sales concept, so be sure to let me know what you think - either in the comments or via email.
| 29 April 2010
In my rush to get the new nucleus-soundlab.com up in early April I missed a few products. Their webpages are now complete, and the products are available for purchase.
Let me know if I missed anything!
| 26 April 2010
I usually don't say much about piracy. In fact, I don't think many developers comment on it - other than in very general terms. But today I want to give you an overview of what piracy means to a smaller software developer like Nucleus SoundLab.
This past Friday, April 23rd, nucleus-soundlab.com recorded its highest-ever number of unique visitors in a 24-hour period - over 3000 visitors. How incredible! My first thought was that we hit an amazing traffic milestone and I couldn't have been happier. As I examined that statistic, I found it rather odd, considering there were less than five product sales that day, as well as a small number of newsletter signups. Consider that prior to April 23rd, approximately 15% of visitors signed up for our newsletter, whereas on the 23rd only 3.7% decided to sign up. So if these visitors weren't downloading our free products, or purchasing our commercial offerings, what were they doing?
The answer to that is listening to MP3s and watching videos. But those actions will normally result in sales, because our demo material is frankly very good. However almost none of these visitors purchased. I investigated further, and found out that a Chinese website was sending many of these customers to our site. Since the site is in Chinese, its extremely hard for non-Chinese users to navigate. Nevertheless I managed to search the site for 'Nucleus SoundLab' and came upon a forum post offering many of our products for free download - as well as a direct link to some webpages on our site. As best as I can tell, all these visitors came to our site from the Chinese pirate page, for the sole reason of listening to MP3s and watching videos to see if our products were worth pirating.
Now, this isn't the first time I've discovered our products available illegally. So I'm not totally heartbroken or anything - this is a universal problem in the digital age that won't be disappearing any time soon. I'm a realist. But this event on the 23rd really hit home. There is absolutely nothing I can do legally to fight back against sites like this in jurisdictions like China. Its a very helpless feeling to not even be able to block users from the piracy site from browsing nucleus-soundlab.com. Obviously the brick-and-mortar comparison is not exact, but imagine if thousands of people descended on Best Buy, in order to research which TV to steal from them after the store closed.
I understand that the vast majority of these pirates wouldn't purchase our products regardless. But I do not accept the proposition that none of them would purchase - or that these people are too poor to purchase any software. Let's face it, anyone who can afford a computer fast enough for computer music is not a pauper. If even one-percent of these pirates would have purchased something instead of copying it, that could totally change the business outlook of Nucleus SoundLab. That money could literally be the difference between whether we have enough resources to develop a new product or not.
Realistically, all I can do is hope that there are enough honest customers out there to support my business. So far, that has been true. And I do the absolute most I can to support my honest customers in return - none of our products have copy protection of any kind, and I am available almost 24/7 to help with any support problems personally. That's all I can do. I'm not going to start to protect Viral Outbreak via an iLok dongle or whatever, but I understand why companies go that route! Its very, very difficult to see piracy happen before your eyes.
So I just wrote this to give you an inside look into what piracy looks like from my perspective. For those of you who are visiting this site for the express purpose of gauging whether our products are worth a pirate download or not - please just understand there is a human being on the other side of nucleus-soundlab.com that wakes up every day, and works on fresh new sound-design for your music full-time. There is no corporate structure here at nucleus-soundlab. No nebulous accounting write-offs based on piracy estimates. It is just my personal passion for audio and music that sustains this business - along with your honesty and support. For those of you who support us now or in the past - thank you so much! I am working harder than ever to produce products that will inspire you and your music. Thanks everyone for reading and have a great day!