Survey results and actions we take (Patreon)

Greetings everyone, it's Michael,

The survey has been running for two weeks, and we already received more than 500 answers and 2000+ comments, which is incredible. The feedback quality is way beyond what I imagined (and I already had very high expectations from you).

This post will be long, I'll do my best to keep it concise, but there's a lot of valuable lessons and graphs to share. To prevent drowning you in the 50+ graphs we have, we show the most meaningful.

General mindset and result validity

Before we dive into numbers, we have some elements to mention.

• Our mindset, while reading the feedback, is: "Whatever the community says, we consider they are right". In other words, if a comment says something factualyl wrong such as "You didn't upload anything on YouTube for two months", it means we didn't do our promotion job properly and the person ended up with the wrong info. It's our fault.
• Only the most dedicated part of the community was ready to invest some time to answer the survey, meaning it's possibly skewed on the positive side.
• You'll see that the results are overwhelmingly positive. While it's really encouraging for us, we do not take them as granted. Quite the opposite. We already took some actions based on your feedback, see further below.
• We had very few trolls, about 1%. Probably because the survey was long enough to deter any bad intentions.

GENERAL Q&A

Within the survey, we received some questions that can't be ordered below a specific graph. We'll answer them here.

"It's hard to know where to find what"

I read this one often. We have a googlesheet list of everything we composed, but it's not ideal. Another comment suggested to build a database. While this may sound like an obvious idea for someone with a degree in IT, I actually never thought about it (shame on me). So whoever mentionned that idea, let me send you a virtual hug as it's a genius idea, and also tell you that I immediately did what you asked: Databases - Michael Ghelfi Studios.

It cost me 200$ in plugins, but it was well worth it. We have three databases. They should be perfectly up to date and easy to use. (We just have some font color problem in the searchbox but I contacted the plugin support team). It's also great that it's on the website, since all the good resources (conditions of use, blog, license shop, etc.) are very close and should end up generating less questioning/confusion from the community.

"Please offer looped tracks"

Filip has been running tests on his side and he will be able to deliver a lot more songs variations! As explained in this post. Among these variations, there will be loops. This is a "Sage" Patreon tier feature though. This month, Filip will have a excellent gift for Sage patrons: you'll receive looped verisons of everything he released since December (50+ tracks).

"Please compose albums for specific campaigns"

I read that often. I know it's something other composers do, but it's actually not legal.

While some of the D&D proper names are OGL (Open Gaming License), most aren't, especially in the official campaigns. Of course we are a small team and we don't risk much to name our albums "Icewind Dale ..." or "Avernus..." but I can't see myself asking others to respect our intellectual property, if we don't respect it ourselves.

However, there's a legal workaround. It comes under the concept of playlists! We want to offer a page on our website where you can find audio recommendations for each specific campaign and where to find each sound (Patreon or Bandcamp/YouTube).

The only problem I have is: I never read the official campaigns and I don't have the time to. That's where the community can help.

=> If you think you share a tracklist for a whole official campaign using our audio only, we will gladly offer albums or compensation of some sort. Contact me here or on Discord.

"It would be nice if you had [Feature]"

90% of the features requests are about features we already implemented. While we may think it's a good thing, it's actually not. It means we aren't good enough to explain our own offer to the community.

As a solution, Toshio is rewriting almost all of the description to make them more readable than my terrible english. We are also trying to turn the website into a hub to all of our services.

Beside that, we are working on simplifying things as much as possible. By example, I retired 20 older albums from Bandcamp (if you bought them, you still have access, but new clients can't buy/see them anymore).

We are also creating bundles of six months of content on Patreon, so new patrons don't have to click on 300 links and assemble everything.

Etc.

Results - General

The answers in white are individual comments. There were mostly paraphrasing "I play ttrpgs", meaning we have about 70% of our members who are using our work for TTRPGs.

Also, about 65% of the TTRPG players are playing remotely, which really surprised me.

Among this population, we can see we have overwhelmingly positive scores. Music has lower scores than ambiences. From my experience, I'd say it's a matter of personal tastes. Music is less 'factual' than ambiences, as it's based on no real world elements. However, we have to keep striving to achieve higher quality. Growing these light blue sticks is the objective.

Fantasy ambiences and fantasy music are the most looked after content. We can see the Sci-fi content has a repulsive element to it to some of our community Same for the contemporary ambiences (not on the graph). We have a solution for that.

Solution

For Patreon, we will increase the amount of Sci-fi content, that's for sure. For YouTube, sharing Sci-fi content on the main page would be extremely detrimental for the algorithm. Instead, we will create another channel for contemporary and sci-fi ambiences and music. This will require a lot of work, but I expect that with the growth we have, I can hire someone for that.

People want to see us a bit more generally. Here's how:

Filip streaming music composition is something we've been speaking together for the past six months. We wanted to have everything rolling well before investing efforts in it, so we do it properly.

Advices for DMs about audio is why we made our blog. It's pretty new so we only have two articles yet, but recording them as videos would be nice.

FAQs or Q&As is also something we'll do in 2022.

Results - Patreon

There's more than 20 graphs for Patreon speficially, so I'll only share the most important, but discuss results of all.

In general, people think Patreon should be better organized. While most recognize Patreon generally sucks for organizing content, they still think we can do better. More precisely, it's said it's hard to find what you can download at each tier.

A year ago, we made this pinned post "The Roost", which lists everything you can download at your tier. We think some people overlooked it. It's our responsibility to better inform Patrons about its existence. Having a "Master" post like this one is the solution most of the TTRPG patreon pages I support personally (as I'm an avid DM) have. However, I'll rework it slightly this week, with images and text, to make it even clearer. We'll also regularly remind patrons about it on releases posts.

In general, people who sub don't know exactly what they will get. My solution is that I'll make a video presentation of the page, probably this week. Showing with more details what to expect. It doesn't concern actual patrons.

66% of the 3$ patrons are here simply to support us and they show an overwhelmingly positive feeling about our page. it's true that if you compare with other composers' pages, this tier is generous. Also, it used to be a "support only" tier, and we ended up offering content anyway.

Comparatively, the 5$ tier patrons are very happy, and the 15$ patrons are even happier. The reason seems to be the 30 min Adventure Themes that Filip compose.

The 10$ tier has the less happy members, see below. We'll spend some time discussing and dissecting the reasons why and what solutions we are taking to correct that.

So first, we can see "less happy" still means happy. However, it's not the overwhelmingly positive feedback we are getting used to see (let me brag a bit please :)). This is not acceptable per our standards, and so we are taking measures.

Solutions

For SFX quantity and quality, we are currently looking for a skilled sound designer. As soon as we hire that person, the problem will be history. That will help me invest more time to compose additional ambiences for that tier.

Upload regularity is a problem. I'm personally responsible of this. While the quantity is always on par with what we promise, it happens you receive most of it late in the month. The problem is that I manage both ambiences composition and... everything else except music composition and YouTube upload schedule. The red/orange proportion isn't big, but it's too big to us. The solution I'm seeing is to generally improve our work process and simply things as much as I can.

Results - Bandcamp

The Bandcamp results analysis is easy to run. According to the results, albums are fairly price (or even cheap) and clients are extremely happy. Another graphs says 95,7% of our customers plan to purchase another album in the future.

As for the comments, someone suggested that the filenames were a bit too long to his taste when imported in Roll20 or FoundryVTT.

Solution. While it's hard coded by Bandcamp, there's a workaround. We will create a blog post and a FAQ answer, as well as explanations within the PDF you receive when you download an album on how to easily bulk shorten names according to your preferences.

Results - YouTube

89% of the respondents are subscribed to the channel. For the remaining 11%, they say at 50% because YouTube isn't practical, 30% say because they buy the content on Bandcamp and the rest because they didn't know about it or use Spotify.

Satisfaction results are also overwhelmingly positive.

I was surprised to see that some people exclusively use it for our radio. It's great news for the composers we are featuring, as they benefit a lot from the free promotion (their own words).

While there's no problem about YouTube, we still plan on creating a Sci-Fi only channel and writing blog posts about how to use YouTube to its full potential. We may also launch new, specific radios once we have enough content.

Lessons learned

• We'll run another survey next year for sure. I used to do that every 6 months on the community tab of the YouTube channel, but GoogleForms are much better at that.
• We will allow less "Other (Specify)" options, as people tend to paraphrase already available answers, which makes the data analysis much harder.
• We'll test the survey more before we share it. There was a small redirection mistake that I spotted after the first 30 people answered. Not a big deal, but it's not good.

Thank you so much again for your participation. We hope you love the efforts we put into this project and we hope you'll be happy with the changes we bring. Together, we are much stronger.

Feedback and discussions are welcome (here or on Discord).

Have a great day

Michael & Team