1000 downloads (with a bullet) on Dreamstime:

The Tom Robinson Band 

I have posted a number of times recently about slow sales at Dreamstime, so it's nice to redress the balance with a good news story from them.

For sometime I had been anticipating being able to post about reaching my 1000th download there. With around 950 downloads I had expected that this post would still be a while in coming. However, all that changed last Sunday (yes, a Sunday!) when I checked my sales figures to find some 54 new downloads all in one day. With a bullet indeed :) These were all subscription downloads, nethertheless it was great to see a daily sales report running across three pages!

Lene Lovich

What had sold (obviously to the same buyer) were virtually all my B/W archive images of British rock bands from 1978/1979. Back then I used to cover the music scene in London and would be out several times a week photographing both up and coming bands and hit artists like the Boomtown Rats, Thin Lizzy and the Tom Robinson Band.

It is really great to see these images being appreciated and downloaded some 38 years later. I'd love to know what project this buyer was working on but realise that I'll probaly never find out.

The Banned

It's worth noting that many of these images were Level 0 (no sales) and online for more than four years. Once these would have qualified for automatic deletion by Dreamstime so I am really glad that they changed their policy on that several years ago.

This supports my belief that stock images (especially Editorial) should always remain online.

 You just never know when a buyer may discover and download your images. Regards, David.

The Boyfriends make Editors Choice at Dreamstime:

Pleased to report that one of my archive Seventies images is currently an Editors Choice at Dreamstime and is featured on their home page. This is my third ever Editors Choice there and, interestingly, all were archive images of bands.
This time my recent upload of British power pop band The Boyfriends was chosen. Formed circa 1977 by former Vibrators guitarist Patrick Collier the band were signed to United Artists Records. I had the pleasure of seeing them play live a number of times and these band pictures were taken before a London gig on August 20, 1978.
For anyone not familiar with the term Power Pop this (in the UK at least) was what followed Punk. Whereas punk was more raucous and often featured acts with limited singing and musical ability, Power Pop saw a move to a more melodic and tuneful style -whilst still maintaining a fast paced guitar based style.
The welcome exposure seems to have worked as the image has been downloaded since being featured. As ever, I have no way of knowing if the buyer was looking for this specific band or just wanted a generic Seventies pop band image.
Either way I'm delighted to have the image highlighted in this way. Regards, David.

Rock and Roll time

Digging back through my negative archives I recently came across these images from May 15, 1976 when music fans held a fun march through the West End of London as part of the Rock and Roll Radio Campaign. The campaign aimed to get more vintage Rock and roll music played on British radio. At that time there were far fewer radio stations available and, of course, the internet didn't exist. Assembling in Hyde Park the march proceeded along Oxford Street ending at BBC Broadcasting House (home to BBC radio). The whole thing was very colourful (if I can use that word for B/W images) with many dressed in fifties "teddy boy" style, a vintage car on hand and Rockabilly band The Flying Saucers playing on the back of a truck.

From three rolls of 35mm negatives I selected 12 images to work with and uploaded these to all my editorial sites over the last couple of weeks. Pleased to report that they all got accepted 100% so far.

Shutterstock came up trumps when 6 of the images were downloaded within a couple of days of going online (along with 20 or so more varied images from the same era -somebody is obviously working on a 1970's related project!).

It was good to see these images which I took 36 years ago getting a whole new lease of life on the internet. Regards, David.