Many thanks to Jon for setting up this poll, and for all the encouraging things which he and several other people have written. I'll have to ask for someone to bring me up to speed about the QQ picnic - obviously I haven't been reading the relevant threads during my years as a lurker....
I'm happy to report that the Dorothee Munyaneza album is now available direct from the
Luminary site. For the sake of simplicity we have decided that the sale price will include worldwide delivery, and (unless we encounter territories which are prohibitively expensive to post to) I would affirm - for the enquiring minds - that a direct sale would indeed be slightly more beneficial to us than an Amazon one.
I'm already thinking about future projects for the label, and would aim to continue releasing these in the same DVD-A / CD package, as well as making a taster version available in the form of a free ISO download, as we did with this album. I decided fairly early on that the Luminary stuff should take a swiss-army-knife approach format-wise and be as widely compatible with the way the outside world consumes its music as possible. For me this meant including mp3 files with discrete starts and endings in the dvd-rom folder, the full variety of dvd-v formats, as well as the best resolution 24-bit 96kHz surround for anyone equipped for it. I thank Neil Wilkes again for his assistance in bringing this to fruition.
Whilst I like being commended for the "iniative and balls" required to see this through, the decision to go it alone arose more from being convinced that the surround aspect of this album was the real success story of the project, which otherwise would maybe fail to distinguish itself from the many other world-music-fusion CD releases on offer out there. My production background in this genre has exposed me to a huge variety of instrumentation and many hues of musical colour. I'm still inspired by this - there is plenty more to be said musically which would, for me, be best said in surround.
I think it's time to let the music do the talking!
At least until the picnic ....
Martin