[Ardour-Users] subscription support down, your ideas sought

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Tue, 13 May 2008, Paul Davis wrote:

> Ardour subscription support fell by nearly 20% last month. Out of the
> thousands of downloaders, just 117 people were subscribing during April,
> and only another 5-10 people made one-time donations.

An idea how many of those were people who cancelled their subscription, 
compared to people whose 12-month subscription run ended and they just
didn't renew?  Would it be possible to reach out to the people whose 
subscriptions lapsed, as a polite reminder, and include directions for 
reactivating their subscriptions?

I'm also wondering if an Ardour survey would be useful, to get a handle on 
how it's perceived in the community, i.e:
What do you like about Ardour?
How could Ardour be improved?
If you subscribed to Ardour at some point in the past, what made you 
decide not to continue subscribing?

etc...

> It is vitally important that the financial support for Ardour gets
> distributed across more than just 100+ people and a couple of companies
> (who could decide to change their minds at any time, as SSL did). If you
> have ideas for how to widen the pool of people who support Ardour,
> especially in an ongoing way, please share them with me via this mailing
> list. I'm particularly interested in ideas that don't actually take me
> much time, either in terms of research or implementation.

That's probably a question that's being asked by many people in the Linux 
communities, not just Ardour, or even Linux audio in general.  Maybe a 
write-up in one the larger Linux mags/e-zines (Linux Journal, etc) or even 
one of the recording mags would help boost visibility.

Also, would it be worthwhile to have a section on Ardour's website to talk 
about Ardour's success stories - people who are using it on a regular 
basis in different settings (home studio, live recording, etc), and also 
possibly providing samples of work that people have produced with Ardour.
I think one of the common threads in the Ardour community and the 
sound/recording geek communities is that people love to talk about their 
rigs and show off their work.  A mutual plus would be that it can help 
counter some of the perception that Ardour is a pain to set up and get 
working correctly, and the people featured would get some welcome 
exposure.

My 2 cents.

jms