Ultima 7 Remake Soundtrack Production

[jdharding]

I'm sorry to say that the sales from the Ultima 7 remake soundtrack honestly are not enough to sustain continued work on this soundtrack. It ate up a lot of my free time and in return I received very little for the hard work I put into it. I do thank the few people (about 7) that did pay to download the album, but a large majority of the people that did download the album (over 200) paid nothing for it.

I'm sure some will argue that charging a minimum fee will solve this problem, but instead all it did was frustrate and/or anger people that do not wish to pay to download the album. (Weird, isn't it?)

So the album's production has been halted while I work on other things that people do pay to download.

I would like to continue to work on the Ultima 7 soundtrack, and to improve upon what I've done thus far, but I can't justify the time spent on it. "Thank you"s are nice, but they don't pay the monthly bills.

So I came up with a plan:

I created a Patreon account and have a monthly minimum of $1. People who pledge at least $1 per month will get copies of songs I've released that month (in wave/.wav file form) and also will ensure continued work on this remake soundtrack. With enough pledges each month I can keep the soundtrack at a $0 minimum price, and I could even afford to add more free downloads to my Bandcamp account.

I only get 200 free freebies each month on my Bandcamp page, and those disappear pretty quickly within 1 or 2 weeks. Adding free downloads to the account would cost me exactly $9 per 300, $20 per 1,000, and $75 per 5,000 (notice it gets 1/3rd cheaper the more freebies I buy). So I'd need at least $9 in monthly pledges to add another 300 free downloads. I know it's a weird system, but at least everyone would be able to download the soundtrack as much as they want and this would also ensure continued work on improving and expanding upon the soundtrack. This would also ensure the other albums on my Bandcamp page will continue to have no minimum fee to download. This system does sorta work for the people who are cheap as well, because just $1 per person per month will ensure continued free albums. If I get 200 $1 pledges each month that would pay for 5,000 free album downloads. With that I could even turn on individual song free downloads again. Nice, huh?

Here's only a few of the improved songs where I used realistic (and expensive) instrument libraries:

01bg. BG Introduction
- Link: http://jdharding.bandcamp.com/track/01b ... troduction

22bg. Stones
- Link: http://jdharding.bandcamp.com/track/22bg-stones

27bg. Mysterious Murders
- Link: http://jdharding.bandcamp.com/track/27b ... us-murders

35bg. Fellowship Theme
- Link: http://jdharding.bandcamp.com/track/35b ... ship-theme

If you want to see more of these improved songs, and more new Serpent Isle songs (and maybe even remake soundtracks for the other Ultima games), please pledge on my Patreon page or purchase the album.

My Patreon page is available at: http://www.patreon.com/jdhardingmusic

Thanks for reading this rather long post.

[Dominus]

I never realized you were doing this to get money out of it. It seemed to me that you were doing it intentionally for free.
We never made money with Exult, putting in many many hours of our free time...

[jdharding]

I give up.

You guys want it free, get it free.

When the free downloads run out each month after only a few days of downloading, don't complain to me that the album automatically reverted back to pay-only. Don't complain that you have to wait until the next month to download it. I will not be reading the messages anymore regarding this.

I'm tired of worrying and stressing over this. I want to offer free downloads, but I'm poor and broke.

Just imagine if Exult had a 200 download limit each month, and only 200 people could download it each month. But if some people donated a little money every month, 1,000 or even 5,000 people could download it.

[Dominus]

JD, I don't care really whether you are offering it for free or if you want money for it. To me it just seemed always that you wanted to offer it for free. That's why I mentioned last time in the thread that the download wasn't free anymore. I honestly thought it was by mistake or an error of that site.
Nowhere did you mention that you expected to be paid for the songs. Not even a "donations would be appreciated". To the contrary you mentioned free yourself a couple of times and said yourself that the price tag was by accident.

Looking again at the thread, no one was angry or frustrated that you were chraging, we just were puzzled why.
Then you gave the download count cap for free downloads. Again nothing that you always wanted money for it.
Of course people offered you alternative ways for hosting the files. Only NOW we learnt that you wanted money for your work.

If we were using a site that only allows 200 downloads we would be using another site. There are million of ways to offer your music for free IF you want to.

And again, I don't care either way, I'm not angry, but I wanted to voice my opinion and discuss it. But honestly expecting $200 A MONTH for these is pretty far fetched IMO (rearangement of songs for a game that is $5 or less to pay for these days, once, possible to be used through an open source free game engine that people have contributed their free time to for over a decade...)

[jdharding]

Maybe I should allow someone else to distribute it. That way I don't have to deal with any of this anymore.

[jdharding]

Nevermind all this stuff I wrote here and delete this topic.

The album will remain free.

Sorry I suggested anything.

[jdharding]

Alright.

The album is now in the creative commons license.

You can distribute it freely where ever.

I've also enabled free individual track download.

Help my free download limit by distributing this thing freely.

[Kirinn]

I understand the frustration of trying to balance getting some kind of required income with a creative endeavor, and I appreciate the hard work you've done and keep doing, JD. I'm afraid creativity hardly ever pays, except as internal satisfaction and admiration from others.

Thank you for going with a CC license. Hopefully this will not only make many Ultima fans happy, but also serves as a kind of portfolio for you, that could lead to a paid contract project a little ways down the road!

[jdharding]

The whole point of getting money was to put it into buying more free downloads for the albums I have on my Bandcamp page. Apparently this is a bad idea. This money wasn't going into my pocket. It was for the site.

Putting these on another site that was strictly free to download would make the few donations I do get from people not possible anymore. If I were to upload it to a free-only site, then I get nothing at all for it ever. With it being on Bandcamp, with no minimum fee, but the option to pay, I do get donations from the few giving people.

Keep in mind that I have many other free albums on my Bandcamp page. Ultima 7 is not the only free album there. So I have to take into account the other albums that I won't be able to offer free downloads for when they run out.

The Patreon thing was simply a way for me to get monthly income so I can pay the monthly fees for extra downloads, and I wouldn't have to pay for them out of my own pocket.

Bare in mind that I've already spent thousands of dollars of my own money on software, gear, and instrument libraries, and I've only made a few hundred in the last 10 or so years I've been on Bandcamp. Only a few hundred dollars. Not thousands. Just hundreds. And I've spent around $10k. So I really don't wish to spend any more of my money to give people free downloads. It would be stupid of me to do so.

So, again, I'll let the free downloads run out each month. When they're gone, they're gone until the next month when they rollover.

[ralphonzolio]

I have in excess of $10k of audio gear I've accumulated over 20 years. I've gotten immense enjoyment out of using it all and have shared some of what I've recorded and produced for my own pleasure. I've never gotten anything out of it aside from satisfaction.

You say the donations were just to add more free downloads to your account, but it seems you think you're owed much more for your work. You're aware there are better free hosting options, so that seems not to be the issue at this point.

What you're doing is priceless, but that doesn't mean it is or should be profitable. I think you'd be a lot happier producing music for your own selfish pleasure, or not bothering to do it at all. Few are going to make a career of remaking old game soundtracks (I believe Powerglove still have day jobs), but it can certainly bring a lot of pleasure to the producer and what listeners are interested in such a thing. The day you expect something material in exchange is the day it becomes a job, and at that pay grade it amounts to part-time slave labor.

[jdharding]

I'm done talking about this at this point. Everyone can go on believing whatever the @!#$ they want. I'm out.

[tsoliman]

I would love to donate towards your patreon, but it is on very shaky grounds, legally.

A donate button is how a lot of derivative works (e.g. mods, remakes, etc) get around this "sale" issue. A fan project is usually distributed for free and the original copyright holder looks the other way. The donate button's existence is orthogonal to the distribution and thus is seen as a separate issue.

By making the delivery of goods and services conditional on payment, you're essentially selling them, and it is no longer a donation system. This means you're benefitting commercially from derivative works. As soon as you get any significant amount of popularity, you can expect attention (C&D letters, DMCA takedowns, etc) from legal teams of copyright holders (EA?).

Take a look at James Woodcock's approach to a similar project and feel free to contact him about how he went about doing this:
http://www.jameswoodcock.co.uk/content/ ... t-project/

The most successful patreon projects I know (e.g. Jimquistion) are ones where there's no strings attached. Donation is entirely optional.
This is the first time I'm hearing of a patreon project where delivery is conditional on donation.

[jdharding]

I changed the Patreon page so there's no rewards to donate on a monthly basis. It's solely for donations only.

I also found out that the extra free downloads on my Bandcamp account are, infact, not a monthly fee. If I pay $9 for 300 extra free downloads, I keep those until they run out. Then I pay another $9 for another 300 free downloads. This is added to the free 200 free downloads I get on the 23rd of each month. So it's not a monthly fee.

However, if I sell more albums I also can get 1,000 free downloads for that, but that takes longer to achieve. Every $500 I make in album sales grants me an extra 1,000 free downloads for the people that want to download albums freely. It's a weird system, I know, and I'm quite a ways away from getting another 1,000 freebies due to my music not being very popular.

All of the music is under the creative commons license to distribute any of it (unchanged / non-commercially / non-profitably) anywhere it can be distributed, or use it in projects, games, and videos. So if this site wants to, it can download the Ultima 7 album in OGG files and distribute it on one of the sites it distributes the Exult software. I will not be updating it anymore, so it's finished as is. I may or may not finish the Serpent Isle soundtrack in the future.

As for James Woodcock's MIDI enhancement project, that's simply running the MIDI files through some form of MIDI synthesizer to produce audio music. Anyone can do that with any form of MIDI synthesizer. I own a MIDI hardware synthesizer that can do this already with the ScummVM engine.

[Duke]

Regardless of whether your doing it for free or asking for donations or whatever, having this music on Bandcamp at all is directly against their Terms of Use:

"What can I upload? Are covers OK?

You must own or control all rights to everything you upload. That means covers are out, unless you have a written license or authorization from the artist to upload the cover to Bandcamp and grant us the rights in the terms below. Do not upload cover songs unless you have obtained all permissions and authorizations in writing! These requirements apply regardless of whether you're selling the music or giving it away. The full details are here."

I think the work you've done is awesome and it's great that you've done it and it's probably even OK that you ask for donations. But Bandcamp was never the appropriate place to do it - it is specifically designed for artists to sell their own music. You don't own this music, however much work you've put into it.

[jdharding]

There's many thousands of artists on Bandcamp that upload covers and remixes of copyrighted music. Bandcamp puts that term there so they can't get in trouble if any copyright holders come by threatening to sue them. They can just feign ignorance on their part and contact those artists in regards to having those songs removed from their accounts.

With that being said, all of the game albums (or any music with copyright holders) are now set to Free Download only. When I run out of free downloads I'll just set them to can't download until I either buy more free downloads with album sales, or wait till the 23rd of the month when the 200 free downloads are automatically replenished. This solves everything.

I've already said in previous responses to disregard this topic and stop posting replies to it.

I've also asked the mods to delete this topic.

[tsoliman]

> There's many thousands of artists on Bandcamp that upload covers and remixes of copyrighted music. Bandcamp puts that term there so they can't get in trouble if any copyright holders come by threatening to sue them...

That's never a valid excuse to violate the TOS. This same line of thinking is what pirates use to justify piracy.

I really like your work but please drop the attitude.

[agentorangeguy]

Would be nice to make money off time spent on fan projects but anytime you are dealing with someone else's work it is iffy at best, "lawyers on your ass" at worst.

[jdharding]

The remake soundtrack is now gone.

That's all I'll say about it here.

If you follow me on Tumblr; you already know why.

[NOTJDHARDING]

This is (probably) the latest version downloaded under the creative commons license that was linked to at JD Harding's bandcamp site
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
These files were created by JD Harding and can be freely downloaded and shared (in any medium or format).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6lo5gaevd5qy7 ... 7.zip?dl=0

[Dominus]

Drama, oh drama.
Nothing to see on tumblr, though.

Edit: seems he rewrote whatever he had written there.

JD Harding Music

Alright, I'll try to clarify myself here because it seems people didn't like my original post about this.

I deleted all of the video game music remixes and covers partly because of licensing fees, and the other part is because the remakes didn't make me feel good when I made them. The remakes were not fun to work on. I felt like I was just combining someone else's notes with my instruments. The remakes just made me feel like a hack.

The remixes, however, were fun to write because a lot of the notes were mine. I used actual creativity with them instead of pairing notes to instruments. Sure, some of the remakes were a lot of work, but they didn't have any of myself in them. They only had my instruments, a little mastering skill and nothing more.

I thought deleting everything would be a step in a new direction, but now I'm wondering if that was a good idea or not. This could hurt my popularity a lot, and anger and/or disappoint a lot of fans.

So now I'm feeling torn about this decision.

I'm thinking about possibly bringing just the remixes back and not the covers/remakes. I have about 100 covers/remakes, though, so it's still not a lot of songs coming back, but it's better than none.

As for the remakes/covers.. hmm. I'm still not sure what to do with these. I don't want them on Bandcamp, Youtube or Soundcloud. I'll have to give these a lot of thought.

I dunno. If some stuff does return slowly to Bandcamp, Youtube and Soundcloud, then that stuff returns. Otherwise I have not made up my mind about these things yet.

Edit2:
And finally

Video Game Music, Part 2
I've gone through all of my video game music and have chosen 50 remakes I don't really want to reupload. These are mostly Square-Enix ones, and they didn't really take me long to make and I feel they were lazy-work on my part. Some of the remakes will return, but these are mostly ones I spent a considerable amount of time remaking.
Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, and Final Fantasy XIII soundtracks won't return. This is because the entire soundtrack was all remakes and I didn't spend much of my time making them.
I'm still not sure about Final Fantasy XII. It had some songs that did take quite a lot of work to make while others didn't take long. Maybe I'll upload only the ones that took a lot of work.
The Ultima 7 soundtrack will most definitely not be returning to the site. Hopefully people downloaded it before I deleted it, and found a way to distribute it themselves. I, however, will not be distributing it anymore as the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
The Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future soundtrack will also not return. This is mostly because it's a remaster, and I really didn't do that much work on it. It also doesn't showcase any of my skills. It's also a quality concern as I can't get 24-bit 48kHz copies of any of the songs and I'm all about audiophile quality.
As for the Youtube videos: These will take a while to re-encode. I plan to do this slowly and upload only a few videos a day. I'm not sure if I'll upload them every day, or just upload them a couple times a week. This will hopefully limit my spam to my Youtube, Google+, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter followers. I really don't want to spam everyone again with all of these videos.
Also, I want to apologize for all of this. I know this sucks for all of you. I have mood swings and depression and these end up causing me to do dumb things like this. And yes, I am on medication, but it's not enough to prevent stupidity. And as far as I know there's no pills I can take to prevent stupidity.

[Kirinn]

Sigh.

Still, I'm glad a lot of good tracks came out of it. Like probably many of us, I have a depressed artist friend and it's not easy for anyone around, her foremost, to deal with. So I hope JD will be happy and successful in the future.

[Dominus]

Amen

[Dominus]

the part 2 text slightly changed

The Ultima 7 soundtrack will return only as a few songs that I personally like. I will not be distributing the full soundtrack any longer. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

http://jdhardingmusic.com/album/ultima-vii

(really last time I'll check out that site. Good luck JD, hope you get your mood swings under control)

[galneon]

This is what it looks like when art is both not produced for its own sake and not profitable.

[Tony Torres]

He, love your work. Went to your patreon page to sign up for a dollar a month but page is gone.

I see a general trend of posts with some ups and downs, all i can say is thank you for what you have done. I appreaciate it, just found it today. If I can help let me know.

[jdharding]

The Patreon page is at https://www.patreon.com/jdmusic

Everyone should ignore all of what I've written in these posts.

The Ultima 7 album is fully free to download with the option to pay. No minimum.

If the page runs out of free downloads, that's how it goes.

You'll have to wait till the following month for the free downloads to replenish.