The 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 r…
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.
