Releasing the Asian Variations free album was a bit of an experiment and in order for it  to be somewhat useful as “market research”, I’ve been keeping count of full-album downloads as far as possible.  Somewhere in this month, the number of downloads since August 2007 passed 5000 (the figure is 5095 at the time of writing). The downloads I’ve been able to count came from my own site at asianvariations.com, jamendo.com and archive.org. I’ve not counted single downloads from soundclick.com, and for obvious reasons haven’t been able to count bit torrent downloads or people sharing copies of the album with their friends. How does that jibe with your expectations for a free album on the web? For my own part, it’s about halfway between a figure I would have been very excited about and one I would have been extremely disappointed with ;^)