Raising Some Money for Charity

In a few weeks, we’ll release the first single from our new album “Body, Monad, World”. We are very excited with how things have turned out, and we think that you are really going to enjoy the album.

As always, we’ll release free versions of the songs in .mp3, itunes .m4a, and .ogg formats at semi-regular intervals as the semester progresses.

We are also going to try something new this time round. In the past, we have encouraged the people who download our music to make a donation to the charity of their choice after downloading our songs. This time around we are also going to offer the chance to “purchase” the uncompressed 16 bit/44.1 khz .wav files in order to raise some money for good causes. We’ve wanted to do this for a while, but figuring out how exactly to do this has been tricky. We’d like to avoid the overhead costs associated with having our songs on a third-party website; and we’d like to avoid having your money in our pockets even for a short while.

So what we are going to do is this. From now until the end of May 2012, you can purchase the uncompressed .wav files by taking the following steps. First, make a donation to the charity of your choice in the amount that you think is appropriate. Second, send an email to the following email address: 21stcenturymonads@gmail.com. In this email, simply tell us that you have made a charitable donation; you don’t need to tell us where if you don’t want to. We’d appreciate if you’d tell us the amount donated since we would like to know how much money has been raised in this fashion. However, we won’t require that you do this. There is no minimum amount you must donate (and obviously no maximum amount either). We are simply going to take your word that you have made a donation.

Once you have sent an email to 21stcenturymonads@gmail.com informing us that you have made a donation, your email address will be added to our address book. In early June 2012 we will send an email to everyone in our address book that will contain the address where to download the .wav files. No money needs to go into our pockets even temporarily and there are no overhead costs.

As mentioned, the .wav files will be 16 bit/44 khz, which is the same bit and sample rate as a CD. They’ll also be dithered to maximize sound quality. (If you don’t know what dithering is, don’t worry; basically, it’s a standard process one does when converting a 24bit file, which is the bitrate we record at, to a 16bit file; the Wikipedia article on dithering is accurate and interesting.) So the quality of the sound will be somewhat better than the free itunes/.mp3/.ogg files we’ll release.

We don’t know how many people will take us up on this offer, but we have a large enough audience for our music that it seems worthwhile to try. Even if only 10% of our audience donates an average of five dollars each, thousands of dollars will be raised for charitable causes.

And as always thanks for listening.