About a year ago I posted an entry about the RAR and ZIP file formats used to package whole releases available from Ektoplazm. In the ensuing discussion, several visitors indicated a strong interest in FLAC, a lossless audio format that is rapidly becoming the industry-standard alternative to the antiquated WAV format. FLAC files are smaller than WAV files (without losing any quality) and they can be tagged (with information such as artist, title, and BPM). This is very useful for digital DJs and collectors who have moved away from storing music on physical media. Seeing the value of the idea, I began posting FLAC versions of all new releases starting in August of 2008.

Today I had a look at downloading trends by format. I compared download counts for 30 releases going back to Journey Of The Turtle and discovered that approximately a quarter (23.2%) of all downloads are lossless (FLAC or WAV). Overall, FLAC accounts for 7.8% of all downloads and 31.4% of all lossless downloads. FLAC appears to be getting more popular–newer releases tend to show a higher proportion of FLAC downloads–but this is just a casual observation.

Of course, some visitors download individual releases more than once–for instance, after trying out a release in MP3 format some visitors probably come back to leech the lossless version. Likewise, I can conceive of situations where listeners return to download MP3 versions for use on portable devices. Such patterns are sure to skew the results but I haven’t been able to puzzle out the appropriate database queries to get to the bottom of it. Maybe next time!

For now, it is enough to get a general idea of the popularity of this new format. If the numbers seem a bit low, don’t worry about it. FLAC is now my standard of choice and I don’t plan on giving it up!