Dear Supporting Members and regular listeners:

For those who have been listening to Echoes on Live365 in MP3, please see our "Cool Age Stream" for an MP3 stream with the same music below the text of this message.

I personally offered the Echoes series a home on Music Sojourn in April of 1999, and we have hosted over 950 hours of Echoes since that date. Even though Music Sojourn lost a lot of money carrying Echoes from 1999 until mid 2001, we stuck with it, and had no intentions of dropping the program as long as we received enough Membership support to at least cover the costs going forward.

Unfortunately, now, Echoes has decided to remove the program series from Music Sojourn.com.  The program will remain on MusicSojourn.com until our contract expires at the beginning of October, 2002. After that time, MusicSojourn.com must remove ALL versions of Echoes (On demand at all stream rates [LO, HI, etc.], Members or Free, and the MP3 stream).

Please understand that this is NOT MUSICSOJOURN.COM's DECISION. It is Echoes decision.

Your Membership with MusicSojourn.com will remain unchanged. We will add additional programs from other similar series, Timeless Canyons, Ambient Caverns and Celtic Currents, plus our very large Ambient and New Age streams to the Membership system as we go forward. ALSO, ALL OTHER 3rd PARTY PROGRAMS WILL REMAIN ON MUSIC SOJOURN for at least another year or longer (meaning programs produced by others like FM Odyssey and Takin' Ya Back).

As an additional Thank You for your Membership support, we have changed the current Echoes section of the Member Streams to provide ALL MEMBERS at the level of 24 or above ACCESS TO ALL OF THE MEMBER STREAMS of Echoes. This also includes the FM Quality and CD Quality streams if you have a high speed connection to take advantage of them.  If you are not yet a member, this is a great 2+ month deal that you probably won't get again for anything similar.

There is no high finance here.  As previously detailed (here), Music Sojourn has been able to continue to build and operate this web site on a budget of less than $25,000 per year.  Your Membership contributions are going, and have gone directly, to pay the costs to bring you this programming.  Nothing else, period (there's not much else you can do on that budget).

We have appreciated the modest level of support that we have received from many of you for Echoes over the past year.  Even though Echoes is leaving, Music Sojourn is still left with the Digital Performance Royalty bill for streaming Echoes over the past 3 years, and will have to pay several thousand dollars for this in October.  We will still need your membership support in order to meet this obligation and go forward with additional programming and streams.

While I am saddened to see Echoes leave, my main concern is for you, our supporting members or long time visitors.  It was based on the support and encouragement of our core base of supporting members over the past 4 years that we developed the system that we now have.  While it is not perfect, it achieved a lot of goals to satisfy requests from a diverse group of site visitors - from those who could afford the best (96 kbps Real Audio) to those who could not afford to support us and just have dial up connections.

• We worked hard to reduce our costs for running MusicSojourn.com over the past two years so we could present Echoes and our other programs to listeners with both some level of FREE content, and additional content at reasonable membership levels. We have specifically avoided fairly expensive cost per month systems that most other online music providers have gone to recently.
      

• Based on requests from you, our listeners and members, we also went to great effort to provide Echoes in multiple streaming formats (Real Audio and MP3 - and we are working on higher quality MP3 streams now), both on-demand and in continuous streams.
      

• We also developed a system, for the Real Player format, to display accurate song titles and related links about the CDs and artists as the programs played.

If these things were important to you for hearing Echoes online, I would encourage you to let Echoes know about them. You can contact them directly at Echoes@echoes.org.

We do not know what Echoes is planning to do with the program online. They did inquire with us about creating a subscription system, and we offered to work with them on this, but we never were given any additional information until the notice to cancel the program. If you would like more information about what will become of the program, I would ask you to contact Echoes directly by email at Echoes@echoes.org.

I am sorry to have to give you this news, and sorry to see Echoes leave our programming family. We wish them well. I know that many of you will be dissapointed, but hope that you will continue to visit us and support our efforts to build the finest library of intelligent music programming alternatives anywhere (and not just around one style of music).  Even though we may not have access to a specific producer's program, we still do have accesss to most of the same music and intend to bring this to you.