IndieGameMusic.com project startup

[mr_lou]

Hello fellow game-developers

I'm writing you because I'm creating a site at www.indiegamemusic.com which I plan to become a link between indie game developers and musicians. This letter is an invitation to you as an indie game-developer, to participate in the design phase with your suggestions and ideas so that the site will end up being something you would like to use.

The idea
In short, I want to make it easy for the indie game-developers (you) to find good music for your games, free for freeware games and cheap for resale. A few steps I have in mind so far, is that you
    * go to indiegamemusic.com
    * click "Search", and input your search criteria
    * listen to results and find contact information to the artist

Your search criterias may be
    * a specific format (mmf, midi, mod, xm, s3m, mp3, ogg etc)
    * a specific license (free for freeware? available for non-exclusive resale? available for exclusive resale?)
    * max file size
    * style
    * category (music, sound-scape, sound-effect, loop part)
    * max channels or polyphony
    * max price
    * maybe preferred bpm

So... That's the idea. What do you think? If this sounds like an interesting project to you, feel free to participate with ideas and feedback at mr_lou@vip.cybercity.dk

Some of the things I'd like some feedback about is
    * how should payment happen? Paypal? Bank-transfer? Game-developer contacting artist and agreeing their own method of payment?
    * what stuff would you like to be able to search for? are there some of the above mentioned search criterias you don't need? why?
    * what formats are you mostly interested in, and why?a
    * and of course: do you think you'd use such a tool like IndieGameMusic.com?



Sincerely,
Roald Strauss
Mr.Lou / Dewfall Productions
www.dewfall.dk
www.lublu.dk

[Nikolas]

So, in fact, you would be creating a music library of sorts, right?

I'm not interested in participating, myself as a composer, but I do have some questions, as well as some replies:

1. What's in it for you? Free for freeware, is... free... Cheap would be cheapo for the composer as well. I am heavily against reducing prices to any business and especially in music, where there is NO guild for COMPOSERS to set prices and guide a strike or whatever, everyone does as they please! I won't take offense, of course and everyone starts from somewhere, but $5 per track is awful for the business! So what's in it for you? (excuse the mistrust, it's the 1 post you made, which made me wonder. Had you been a citizen of AGS I would have much less mistrust...)

And while I'm at prices, etc. what about licensing? What about the composers, and copyrights, and licenses (yes I repeat the word twice). I wouldn't think that with cheap prices, anyone would value selling their music for $50... (for example) and then never be able to use it again. So options of reselling, or total buyout, etc?

2. What is different from any other library, in fact?

3. For sound effects, there are already 2 excellent projects going on with rather big success. I won't be naming them here, only for respect to you, but still there are.

4. Your search criteria are fine, and well thought out I think. Nothing to add there really.

5. If you get nothing out of the whole story, then let them choose thier own method of payment, and have it added to the search criteria (* bank, paypal, wire transfer, etc)

6. Usually people search for specific styles, or moods. It's how music is communicated to the masses pretty much. So an idea would be to be able to search by "tags", and the composer should be forced to add tags, on what the music is. R&B, orchestral epic, sad, happy, space. This kind of thing.

7. I've never dealt with anything else than wav, mp3 and ogg. Even in XBox, and other consoles (don't know about Nintendo DS however) usually the composer delivers in the above formats and the transfer is made inside the house.

8. Personally no, I wouldn't use it. I'm not making games, I'm making music!

[Radiant]

You are aware, I hope, that most indie developers have a zero budget?

[mr_lou]

I am a game-developer on the Java ME platform (mobile phones), and we're slowly planning on doing Flash games in the future as well. See our site at www.lublu.dk
I am also working on a little adventure game in AGS with the girlfriend. That's why I came here.

I am also a musician, with 20+ years of experience on various platforms and tools. See my site at www.dewfall.dk

In this thread here at AGS forums, I'm addressing game-developers. Musicians please read this letter instead:
http://www.ctgmusic.com/topic.php?id=8664

I'm not interested in participating, myself as a composer

8. Personally no, I wouldn't use it. I'm not making games, I'm making music!

Thanks for the long reply. I have replied your post at CTG Music in order to keep the discussions separated.

You are aware, I hope, that most indie developers have a zero budget?

Yes, that's exactly why this is a good idea. You see, the problem is that when a game-developer asks a musician for music, the musician has to spend at least 2-3 days creating it. As far as I know, no indie game-developer wants to pay a musician for 2-3 days work. And the musician doesn't want to be ripped of either. He especially don't want to give away his music for free, if the game-developer is making money on the game.

But many musicians are doing tracks all the time. Why not put these tracks on display, offering them for resale at a very low price? That's what I've been doing with my own MIDI stuff, offering them to Java ME developers at my J2ME Music section, and that has been working out fine. It is this section I now want to expand into offering more formats, and since I'm going to create such a system for myself anyway, I might as well open up for other musicians also.

I'm posting here to ask you as game-developers, what would you like in such a system? I know that Adventure Game Studio is very flexible when it comes to music, since it can handle both MID, MOD, XM and MP3. As a game-developer on the AGS platform, you therefor don't have any real restrictions with music really.
I'm thinking that in your case, you would probably like to be able to search for music in all those formats, so that the search-result would display music in either one of those 4 formats - you don't really care what the format is anyway, right?
That tells me that I have to implement some way of selecting all 4 formats, and not just one of them, and search result should then display all tracks whose format is among the chosen ones.
But game-developers that are aiming at porting their game on multiple platforms (e.g. mobile phone and Flash would require a MIDI and MP3/WAV version of the same track) might want another search-function; i.e. one that lets them search for tracks that are available in multiple formats. (As a game-developer, you might not be allowed to create your own MP3 version of a MIDI. That depends on decisions the musician makes).

It is simple things like this you can help me help you with here in the early beginning of this project.

[m0ds]

This doesn't sound too bad at all to me, I'd probably sign my details up It could be very useful for people looking for game music I'm sure. Other than that, I'm just interested to know of your success in the mobile-phone music stuff because its an area I've been interested in breaking into for a long time but not really known how. Anyway, good luck with the website!

[mr_lou]

This doesn't sound too bad at all to me, I'd probably sign my details up It could be very useful for people looking for game music I'm sure.

Well I sure hope so.    But it depends on how the end result looks like, so I'm spending a lot of time trying to figure out the most optimal solution for all (including myself). Currently I'm thinking that artists probably don't want to upload their music, but instead just input a URL to somewhere they already host their music. Regardless of how it'll be, I'm also thinking about restricting these URL's to direct files only. That means, when we click a track we want to listen to it - we do not want to just open another page where we again have to click play.... or do we?

Other than that, I'm just interested to know of your success in the mobile-phone music stuff because its an area I've been interested in breaking into for a long time but not really known how.

Depends on how you define success. 
It's a rather recent section of my page, and not many people know about it. Also have a look at the prices. They are extremely low, yet I haven't sold a whole lot. Apart from one bigger order from Sony Ericsson, it's been mostly small indie companies, and probably half of them doing freeware games.
So if you mean financial success, then not much to report.
But I like doing it, and I think I have success in finding methods on how to create and improve these MIDI files, and eventually - especially when IndieGameMusic.com gets up - more game-developers will know about it.
Doing MIDI for Java ME is very much about analyzing each note, and consider if it's important or not. Each byte counts, especially for developers wanting to support older phones. It's also important to stick with few effects, otherwise it might not work at all. If you want to dig into it, you can find more tips and tricks in this tutorial I wrote.

Anyway, good luck with the website!

Thanks!    If only the domain would go through so I can get started.

[mr_lou]

Alrighty then.

The site is now online!

http://www.indiegamemusic.com

You can search for a lot of stuff, like license types, filetypes, price, bpm, duration, filesize, polyphony, channels, genre and mood.

Now it just needs to build up a library. 

Feedback appreciated.

[miguel]

I've been to the site and it looks promissing and a very interesting idea. There's not many files if you pick all the options you have avaiable but it's only in the start and authors should upload their files soon.
thank you for it

[mr_lou]

I've been to the site and it looks promissing and a very interesting idea. There's not many files if you pick all the options you have avaiable but it's only in the start and authors should upload their files soon.
thank you for it

Great that you like it.

I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on the search function from other game-developers as well, so I think this site has a lot of potential. Spread the word, so we can build up a library.

Also, if you'd like to contribute otherwise, here are some banners you can put on your website:

Targeting the musician:
http://www.indiegamemusic.com/banners/igmbanner468x60-target-musicians.png

Targeting the game developer:
http://www.indiegamemusic.com/banners/igmbanner468x60-target-developers.png

And a tiny one.
http://www.indiegamemusic.com/banners/igmbanner88x31.png

Thanks

[m0ds]

Nice job, I've registered & logged in, but there are no new menu items to click, just the original 4.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I signed up.  Somebody has to stop m0ds from making the music for every game EVER. 

[m0ds]

That time will come, just not yet  :

[mr_lou]

Nice job, I've registered & logged in, but there are no new menu items to click, just the original 4.

Yea, there has been a coding error today, but it's fixed now.
Sorry 'bout that.