Jason Greshes wrote:

>Just out of curiosity...how much of a sales difference do the print
>reviews make? I know that I would never have heard of OgreOgress if not
>for reading reviews of the Feldman Violin and String Quartet last month
>in both ARG and Fanfare, which I promptly ordered. I'm wondering how
>many others did the same. (Great recording, although I have to say,
>geez that is the worst packaging I've ever seen.)

I guess you were one of 10 people to order Morton Feldman "Violin and
String Quartet" in September (via our website or Amazon.com, where we
can track these things).  We've found that print reviews might result
in 10-20 sales, that is it.  We've sold more CDs per month as a result
of online reviews like the following ...

   http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco9/ogress/fuerzas.html

... and, the fact we release only currently unrecorded material causes
most of our sales to occur BEFORE any reviews are issued.  So, we are
different in this regard ...  also, our titles have no physical distribution
(we've tried, but no luck) except in Canada (Verge).

Print reviews (even good ones) do not always mean more sales in today's
internet-based world, especially the type of music we record (the folks
reading Gramophone and Fanfare often avoid newer/experimental music).
Reviews in The Wire result in more sales for us than any other print
source.

Our packaging is environmentally friendly, lightweight and very low
cost to ship.  Some might say cheap and "worst packaging I've ever seen."
We are sticking with it.  Since most of our sales are mail order (one
at a time) this saves us (and you) lots of money on shipping/overall
price ... lowering the cost of product as much as possible (we only press
a small number of CDs, so the cost of duplication is high).  We will
continue to release our titles in this way until we have distribution
in the USA.

Glenn Freeman
http://profiles.yahoo.com/glennfgrfnorg