More than 100,000 free releases have been downloaded from Ektoplazm since tracking began about six months ago! The new emphasis on direct downloads has really paid off—visitors can now leech gigabytes of free and legal psychedelic dance music without any hassle. It was only last month that I decided to shut down the Ektoplazm BitTorrent tracker in order to focus on providing a much more convenient means of accessing all of the releases in the free music catalogue. Clearly this strategy has worked well—people are downloading more free psytrance releases than ever before!

It is interesting to consider the numbers in the light of the current situation in the commercial psytrance market. Most labels are lucky to sell a few hundred copies of a release these days. The reasons for this are multiplex, but P2P sharing and illegal downloading are only part of the story. Market saturation has never been as high as it is now—there are more active labels and artists than ever before. DJ Core of PsyDB has posted a set of interesting graphs and statistics illustrating this point. Sales have decreased in part because there are so many new labels and artists competing for a slice of the pie.

Many psytrance CDs released today are designed to promote those involved in its creation. It used to be that a band would go on tour to support an album but those days are over; now the band releases an album to support a tour. If the goal is mainly one of promotion, does it make sense to charge money for a release? Manufacturing costs remain unavoidable when it comes to physical media but the digital realm is much more forgiving. Think about the amount of money that would be involved in printing and shipping 100,000 CDs! Ektoplazm has facilitated the distribution of an immense amount of music at a tiny fraction of what it would have cost in the real world. The possibilities of digital distribution are truly staggering—and this is only the beginning.

Thank you all for your sustained support and keep on downloading!