I just wanted to share some of my personal findings, as we’ve gone through a transition from more generic stock to authentic content twice before in other content types. First with Photos and then again about 1-2 years later in Footage, and the exact same thing appears to be playing out now in Music.
Photos and Footage share a lot of similarities and for as long back as I can remember, nearly all stock Photos/Footage libraries looked very similar. Generic stock assets, where the entire scene was in-focus, obviously staged scenes, with washed out lighting and talent wearing forced cheesy smiles. Then one day, we just started getting requests for candid imagery that looked and felt like you’d expect a custom professional shoot to look. Candid & diverse subjects, in believable scenes, with natural lighting, and good use of depth of field. We started referring to the style internally as ‘authentic’ imagery.
Photos had the earliest and strongest demand out of the now three instances, but even there, the transition to customers preferring authentic imagery still took well over a year, and over 2 years for Footage. The transition period, especially in the beginning was a bit difficult. For as long as I’ve known about stock imagery, it’s always had that very generic look and feel. Customers have grown accustomed to it over the years, and most didn’t see the value in the more authentic look. At least not immediately.
As an author dedicating time and resources to produce stock content, you take on a lot of risk by creating content that doesn’t immediately appeal to the widest possible customer base. So it became a bit of a vicious circle, where authors would occasionally attempt to produce authentic content, the content would get buried by new, more generic content, and most of the people that did come across it, still preferred the older look. So the authentic assets would underperform, causing those authors to hesitate and in some cases fully revert back to the more traditional style.
The movement picked up steam organically over a pretty long period of time. Along the way, we tried our best to almost train our customer base on the value of authentic stock slowly without being too intrusive. Initially, we were just focused on getting authentic content into the library. Then we began promoting it through features, collections, and articles showcasing high quality examples, while also explaining the value proposition. Once some authentic visual assets caught on and started performing well, it gave other authors the confidence they needed to be able to produce authentic content as well. And after some more time, we got to the point where new content being published was pretty evenly split across the two styles. Once there was enough content in the library that customers were encountering it on a regular basis, they slowly started opening up to it.
It took a while, but it ended up working out - with authentic content making up the vast majority of newly published items for both Photos and Footage today. And Photo & Footage customers have now grown to expect authenticity.
I suspect the same thing will happen here with Music. We’re taking what we learned from the previous two transitions and applying it here. The PureHits library is a bit of a pilot initiative, where we aimed to explain and demonstrate the value a little faster by building up our authentic offering and hopefully chipping away some of the risk involved with creating content for a small but growing group of customers.
We will be looking to begin making authentic content easier to find, and have some things planned to showcase it further. We know there’s actually a fair amount of authentic music already available in the library, and intend to include as much of it as we can in any/all efforts we roll out throughout this initiative.
So if you feel like some or all of your Music content could be considered authentic, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I’d be happy to take a look at it with the team and consider including it.
), so this should help build towards the kind of critical mass that might get vocal-seeking customers coming to Envato, instead of licensing their music elsewhere.
I’m still waiting for an element invitation !