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Hi dear Patrons,

Recently, there has been many new things going about my channel. This may not be obvious from the outside, but I'm reconsidering some choices I had made, to make sure my ambiences keep evolving and improving in quality.

As you know, quality often supposes price, and your support on Patreon has been decisive for me to purchase professional quality sound assets.

I feel like I didn't give you enough in return, as I used to consider Patreon only as a "little plus" for me, made for those very generous who wanted to thank me for the sounds I put for free on YouTube.

I'm now thinking it should change, as actually I find it unfair towards you, since you are giving more than the regular youtube subscriber but get little more in return (a fancy rank on Discord, your name in the description of my videos and 5-6 songs for free per year, and about two complimentary albums for the most generous). Also, that situation highly impairs the potential of improvement, as professional sound libraries are ridiculously expensive and the YouTube earnings dropped by about 45% because of the COVID situation.

That's why I'm thinking about new things to give you. First to properly thank you for your generosity, and secondly to be able to rely more on Patreon for the future of my work and, some day maybe, to make a living out of it (fyi. I reduced my work percentage to 80% to dedicate myself more to the channel).

If you have any idea of things I could give you, please do not be shy. I've always been able to rely on my community to get ideas, I could even say the best ideas even came out of the mind of that community, not mine.

Have a beautiful day and happy adventuring!

(PS: tomorrow I'll have a surprise for you!)


Comments

ReferenceError

Hey Michael, this sounds great! :) I'm not sure how applicable it is to your work, but besides you I'm also subscried to the Patreon of https://tabletopaudio.com/. What he does is to offer alternative versions of the ambiences found on the website for his Patrons. For example, some of the tracks on the site have a mix of ambience with music. On Patreon he then offers one or two alternative versions, e.g. "Music only" or "Ambience only" -- which I *greatly* appreciate, because sometimes I really only want to listen to the ambience, and sometimes the subtle music in the background is really good as well. Maybe a practical example for an alternative version for ambience-only tracks would be: Imagine a "busy office"-ambience and since it's a busy office, there will probably be telephones ringing. That would be an understandable choice to make, but maybe some people would love to have a version without the telephone noises. If you would offer alternative mixes like that to your Patrons, I'd surely consider upgrading my pledge a bit more (besides also buying stuff on Bandcamp). I'm sure you would have many ideas yourself for alternative versions for some of the ambiences you've done, and will do in the future. I imagine a single track is full of many, many decisions, and well, some of those decisions could have good alternatives as well. In any case, I appreciate your work and look forward to hearing more from you. :)

MichaelGhelfi

Hi ReferenceError, I sincerely thank you for your message. It really means a lot that you spent the time to write to me such a comprehensive recommendation. I'll definitely consider the idea of creating alternative versions. That's something I can do, and I often hesitate between several versions of the same ambience.

Sesser

Howdy! First off, thanks for creating that free pack for the FoundryVTT release. I was a subscriber and avid user of Roll20 for around a decade, and it only took me 2 hours with Foundry to abandon Roll20 entirely. It was nice to see your name pop up. As for stuff here, maybe tie a number of downloadable releases to the pledged tier. I know you release them free on youtube, but I like having the mp3s to previously upload into Roll20's native system or now to add to my server for FoundryVTT. I think simply allowing greater access to mp3s for patreon subscription would be a way to go. Looking at your youtube channel, you've released 10 in the last 4 weeks. Reviewing the bandcamp, an album is usually $9 for around 10 to 50 tracks. So lets just round it all up and say $1 a track. Based on monthly tier, allow that many downloads. $1 tier? Get 1 of them as mp3 per month. $3 tier? Get 3 of them as mp3 per month. This would cap off (this month) at $10, and tiers beyond $10 is when you get into allowing things beyond just the music, such as commercial rights, etc. The major drawback is I don't think Patreon has a way to let someone pick and choose from a list X times a month, so a subscriber wouldn't be able to pick which ones they wanted. It would have to be first release in the month is available to all, second release to all but the $1 tier, third release to all but the $1 and $2 tier, etc. The bandcamp albums would remain valuable if someone were to want to get access to stuff before they joined. Hmm, thinking about it, I am not sure if Patreon can do "going forward" only on posts. Yeah, there's some hurdles to the model here based on what Patreon can and cannot do, I just know I'd enjoy having more mp3s to load into my games on the regular.

ReferenceError

Yeah, a cool model like that would be awesome, but like you mentioned, I don't think Patreon offers something like this. Maybe Bandcamp offers coupons that can be redeemed once per account? I haven't fully thought it through, but that might be a solution worth looking into.

MichaelGhelfi

It would be an absolutely perfect model!.... Sadly, it's technically impossible. These features don't exist on Patreon and there's no Patreon/Bandcamp integration. :s

Sesser

Yeah, sadly I don't know what Patreon or Bandcamp can and cannot do, that's just the one thing that comes to mind: More access to the mp3s that we can use in our VTT games. Youtube is great when sitting at a table, but VTTs generally need them uploaded to link to the scene, etc.