Out of curiosity, I occasionally monitor the statistics on this site and my composer web page for the number of "hits" they receive. I get very little traffic, since the blog is more of less a private page for friends and family, and my composer website does not attract much attention at all. Historically, both sites have gotten one or two hits on per day and those hits originate from around the globe.
Something changed around January of 2009. My composer website is now inundated with hits from China.
Something changed around January of 2009. My composer website is now inundated with hits from China.
There is a website known as Baidu that links Chinese users to MP3 music files, and it has apparently included my recorded music in their library. The name 'Baidu' was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty.
Baidu is the leading search engine for websites in China for audio files and images. It provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. The search engine attracted at least 5.5 million visitors last year.
All of my audio files have had a surge in downloads. There were 2,726 downloads originating from China in just the past month from Baidu.
Of course I do not receive any payment for sharing my music (nor do the performers), but it's nice to know that someone is listening to it. In actuality, I have never earned a single penny from my musical compositions, so I see no reason to change my business model at this late stage in the game.
There are also "free" scores available in Adobe PDF format on my composer website. It appears that there is some interest in those scores coming from Germany. A number of people have downloaded copies of my yet-unperformed works (i.e. Tone Poem for orchestra and the Piano Quintet). It would be interesting to learn if these works find an audience after all of these years.
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