brianfending.com

My friend Kevin has been working on a feature for his site, AmishCookOnline.com, wherein visitors can subscribe to a feature at the site to rent a "Listening Station" to hear a couple of yodels for fourteen days. My reaction when he first told me about it was, "Oooooookaaaaaaay...," but I was pleasantly surprised (a) at the quality of the yodels and (b) that it's actually selling. People are really, seriously interested in hearing this pair of tracks - no matter that it can't be downloaded, access expires in fourteen days, and the recording quality is that of an old ethnographic field recording (read: "not high"). Beyond that, he wanted to perform a little experiment and offer it at several price levels, all for the same product. "Pick your own price," the copy reads. And it worked - many people are choosing to pay more than the minimum. He's a genius on some level, I swear. And the Amish family starring in the yodels is getting their fair share as they rightfully should. It's just too perfect.

First, a note about the yodeling that I blogged at his site. It's seriously fascinating to hear.

Here's what *you* need to do to make your very own such recording and put it up for sale/rent/lease:

1. Find a yodeling family.
2. Call them (more difficult for Amish families) and use something like recordmycalls.com to document the proceedings. The quality of the phone on the singers' end plays a critical role here, but it will never, ever sound like you leased an ISDN and built a recording studio at their house.
3. Download the audio from the remote-recording site and scrub it with something like Audacity (free) or Logic (not so free).
4. Import into a Drupal site using the integrated Audio, E-Commerce, and a few other modules that escape me at the moment.
5. If your singing family is in fact Amish, make sure users can't download the audio - it will immensely displease your musicians and you'll be looking behind you every time you hear horses...
6. Connect the payment mechanism to either an integrated gateway or a regular PayPal workflow using PayPal IPN.
7. If you build it, they will come. Apparently. ;)

In all, a VERY fun, low-budget project. And aren't those the best kind??

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