Soundsupply Drop 2 from Soundsupply on Vimeo.
We previously wrote about Soundsupply a few months ago, but with the release of the second bunch of albums we thought it was something worth revisiting in more detail.
Over the past two years, the bundle model has become a viable distribution channel in the world of games. The idea is simple: gather up a bunch of independent games and sell them for cheap, usually without digital rights management (DRM) and with the bulk of the money raised either going to charity or straight to the developers. Different pricing schemes have emerged from the various bundles, but they all give you the opportunity to buy upwards of five games for a fraction of what even one of them would cost normally. And because the idea is still trendy, a bundle can get noticed simply by the fact that it’s a bundle, regardless of the quality or popularity of the contents.
Considering how popular the bundle approach has become in gaming, it’s not surprising that the idea is now finding its way to other media. Enter Soundsupply. Soundsupply functions very much like the game bundles described above: gather 10 albums in a DRM-free format and sell them for cheap, eschewing price gimmicks in favor of a flat $15 charge. You don’t need to crunch the numbers to know that $15 for 10 albums is an incredible value. Of course, that’s assuming the music is worth your money at all.
One of the criticisms of the bundle model is that the quality can vary wildly within the bundle itself, but that worry is usually mitigated by the low cost of entry. It doesn’t really matter if there is a dud in the bunch when you only paid a few dollars for the lot. Granted, $15 is a decent chunk of change for some, but at $1.50 per album the real cost is time. And while time is certainly a treasured commodity these days, there are certainly bigger wastes of it then spending 45 minutes on a record it turns out you don’t love.
Continue reading “Gaming the System: Soundsupply” →
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