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L
ast issue I mentioned some of the things we’d been finding out from our ongoing readership
survey. Thanks to the many hundreds of you who partici- pated, because the statistics and your comments have helped greatly in understand- ing where our strengths (and a few weaknesses) lie, and par- ticularly in convincing us to make a change that we have been wondering about for a while.
We’ve been concerned about our twice-yearly free CDs. When we first introduced these back in 1994, long before the internet became a music source, their main purpose was to let you hear music that we were writing about but was very hard to find, simply to encourage you to buy the source albums. They certainly have done that, but we didn’t expect that they’d become collectable and long-term favourite albums in their own right – possibly because, unlike many free CDs with magazines, they’ve always been entirely selected and sequenced editorially: nothing’s been on there because of payola or advertorial (that’s why we could only do two a year: we pay for them, and we’re small).
Now, of course, you can hear this music via our fRoots
Radio podcast – but the rules for licensing podcasts require that they’re a mix of speech and music presented as a single continuous programme with no track markers: entertaining (I hope!) but not as user friendly as an album.
In recent times the covermount CDs have become a real drain on our resources, not just the costs of manufacturing and royalties but the substantial extra amounts they add to postal charges which have escalated way beyond inflation. On top of that, maybe we all ought to take a long hard look at the environmental costs of transporting extra unso- licited oil and tree-sourced products around the planet.
But look what we’ve learned now! All but a tiny minority of you now have home computers, are internet savvy and used to downloading. Lots of you would like the music we’ve been giving you on the fRoots CD series more often. Lightbulb! What if, instead of increasing the subscription price as we would otherwise have to do, we give you the album tracks to download in a Zipped folder that also con- tains artwork for a slimline CD case booklet? That way you still get to enjoy the fRoots albums, you get to decide whether to burn them to CD or just listen on your computer or iPod, you are still encouraged to go out and buy the source CDs and, best of all, we can double the frequency to four a year whilst keeping our subscription price the same. Everybody wins including twice as many artists who get the exposure. So we’re going to make that change from the Aug/Sept double issue. With easy-to-follow instructions!
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We’re also finalising a move, hopefully in late July: full details next issue. Bear this in mind, though: keep a watch on our web site and be aware that at some point in the quieter time covered by that summer double issue we’ll have a period of office closure while we go, move, shift.
Ian Anderson
Photo: Judith Burrows
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