Contribution Request

Hi Folks,

Regular visitors to the site will be familiar with this almost annual post. It is one that I always hate putting together but I feel is necessary to ensure the on-going functionality of the site.

Aural Sculptors has been active and regularly maintained for eight years now. In that time, the majority of music related blog sites offering fan to fan sharing of live recordings on a non-profit basis from which I drew the initial inspiration have thrown in the towel.

For the last few years WeTransfer has provided an excellent, stable and reliable host for these files. In the years that I have been using this provider the subscriptions have remained stable at £210 per year whilst the storage capacity that they are offering continues to increase! The situation now is that based based upon the maintenance of two accounts the Aural Sculptors site has a maximum capacity of 2 TB, which is is pretty phenomenal. This allows me to continue to post lossless recordings (rather than compressed MP3 versions) which is often a stipulation that other tapers have in order for their recordings to be shared to a wider audience. The current arrangements are such that with everything on the site I am using 10% of the available storage space which means that capacity will not be a problem for at least another couple of years.

Content-wise I do my level best to make the site relevant and interesting and all importantly loaded with recordings that fans of The Stranglers and related bands will be interested in. Thankfully I have a network of people who are bought into the process and will offer up recordings of interest to share on the site. To these people as always I offer my great gratitude.

If this site offers anything (and I hope that it does) I would be most happy if it goes some way towards preventing people from profiteering on sites such as eBay when attempting to sell, often successfully and very high prices, recordings that are made available by fans for fans for nothing. In this respect I understand that the profiteers have moved on somewhat to other forms of fakery to sell  to the less informed but the prevalence of artwork that I have prepared for the site that appears on commercial sites is still a source of dismay.

For those wishing to make a contribution to the running of the site there is a PayPal button located on the right hand side panel.

I thank the contributors and supporters of the site for their continued interest and wish all a great Christmas and an active gigging 2020!

Cheers,

Adrian.