Oktoberfest in September?! What a world…
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Apart from the 100 authors invited to Elements can anyone point any benefict that Elements could give to the rest of authors in audiojungle? There is anything Envato is doing to redirect to Audiojungle buyers that are not interested in paying for subscriptions?
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If it’s being marketed to, and bringing in, people who have never heard of Envato before… then it might result in some additional sales on the marketplace. Aside from that, probably not much.
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But why is there no link from Elements authors to the Marketplace? Lets say I find a some footage from you SpaceStockFootage and want to check out more of your work at videohive, why is that so hard?
I also find it strange that a lot of items have audiojungle preview music but many of them no credits or links to the music itself. Is it because they have uploaded lots of items to Elements and not bothered to make a description?
That’s a good question
Items are ported over automatically from Videohive, you can’t enter descriptions on Elements. I’m not entirely sure why most items have no description… it’s probably why they brought in the text descriptions rather than HTML descriptions. And I’m pretty certain it’s definitely why there’s now a specific section where you need to enter music links on new items, rather than just having them in the description.
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I haven’t seen an official Envato thread requesting new ideas, but if you did start one, I think it could be an interesting topic. It can’t hurt to try and communicate new ideas to the Envato team.
I think any marketing tips people wish to share would be super useful! A thread dedicated to marketing and how to make more sales is a great idea I think. 
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Since they’ve limited this to 100 authors (so I’ve heard) and did not invite top sellers, what they seem to be doing is luring new customers with the promise of getting more for less while at the same time not offering their best quality items in the subscription because they want to subtly push the new customers to the more expensive single item licensing. Most likely, that is the real purpose of the subscription service.
A lot of new Elements customers may not have been a market customer before, so they aren’t necessarily familiar with AJ. If they do what I’ve seen done elsewhere, after someone joins, Envato can target them via marketing emails and base the messages on their habits in Elements or interests expressed in a sign-up questionnaire. For example, if tracking shows that they frequently check music tracks, they might get marketing emails about AJ. After looking through Elements and not really finding anything great (as intended), they might start using AJ for music tracks. In that scenario, Elements is being used as bait for the markets. They might find something in Elements, but probably not much.
If I’m right about the above, Elements will probably not hurt authors and might boost overall sales at AJ. But the biggest benefit to this definitely goes to Envato and not the authors. I wouldn’t expect much in terms of increased revenue for you, but they will do very well as this appears to be a proven model and the addition of audio sweetens the deal. As for those who contribute to it, I think it would definitely be a mistake to put all of their tracks in Elements. They probably should only put their tracks with little to no sales there. Since they all would have provided lower quality tracks to Elements compared with what’s in AJ, they haven’t actually devalued anything in AJ except for their own tracks that are in Elements. It would also give additional exposure outside of AJ to tracks that would otherwise be lost in the market’s bloated search engine and were not doing that well.
What I’m saying all pends on whether or not Envato eventually stars inviting top sellers and dramatically expands the number of Elements contributors. If they do that, things will go probably downhill for what I think are obvious reasons.
I was extremely against this subscription model until I took a look at general marketing research from 2013 to the present and heard that the top sellers were not invited. Knowing that the bigger sellers and higher quality tracks would not be in Elements changed everything for me. Now, I think it’s mostly harmless and might add a few sales here and there to your portfolio.
Not sure where you have gotten your intelligence about who is invited to participate and who is not, but I have heard the exact opposite. What Envato is doing is slightly shady because the discussion about elements taking place here is one thing and the private discussion taking place by the invited one’s is “another thing” not visible to us. They have the power to negotiate certain terms of the deal. One negotiating point they should insist on is getting a copy of all the data about who is downloading what, and certainly every “add license” should trigger a file copy for the author. This should be done for two reasons.
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We already kind of have that now where we get a copy of every invoice for each sync license sold. Why should it be any different in Elements?
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If there are ever copyright claims issues and disputes about copyright infringement on YOUTUBE or even a downloader attempting to resell the music, there is some legal information on file.
Remember Envato, you are licensing others’ property, not your own so the owner of the property should get a copy of every license granted. Invited authors, are you demanding that?
Licensing music should be taken very seriously even at the youtube level. When customers are not asked to “Add license” which should also include their name, business name, address, state, country region, zip, and also “intended usage”, they are just getting way too much for way too little. All of that information should be filed in every authors account just as we all get a stack of invoices under the current system.
Again, I still am not warming up to elements at all because frankly, I do not want the synchronization license to ever be replaced. And a reminder to all, no one has to participate, even if you are invited. Things still seem to be clipping along pretty well as is.
This brings me to this final question: why would a successful and talented author who is selling in high volume want to participate in the elements model which clearly devalues their music?
I don’t buy into the put old low sellers in there strategy. To my surprise again today, I sold a 5 year old tune with only 3 sales for $49 to a wedding cinematographer in LA.
Folks, our customers are not in a recession and in desperate need of cost savings with music. Not at all!
Envato must roll this out intelligently so we all keep the existing spend from customers in play. Can I say this again? OUR CORE PROFESSIONAL CUSTOMERS ARE NOT ASKING FOR CHEAPER OPTIONS. THEY CAN AFFORD CURRENT RATES AND SEEMINGLY ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR TRACKS AS PRICED.
Figure out a way to capture the cheap youtube crowd but do so in a manner where you do not reduce the spend of our core clients.
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They could do, but I’ve not seen any evidence of that. All marketing via email is pretty much Elements-specific, and there’s very little, if any, promotion of Envato Marketplaces once somebody is on Elements. Also not sure where you got the ‘did not invite top sellers’ part from… do you have a link to that? I don’t know who they have or haven’t invited, but if they want to have a successful launch of audio on Elements, then it would make sense to have some top talent and popular tracks on there. A vast selection of tracks that have had ‘little to no sales’ is unlikely to inspire confidence in potential subscribers.
You can, write your description in the new text description field on videohive.
Both @leto and @soundroll have stated in the forum that they were not invited and both are pretty far up there in the sales department. I’m making an assumption that could always be inaccurate. I just don’t think it is or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. I have no other sources. However, while I do not participate in Elements, or even AJ for that matter, I have been on another site that has a subscription model and single item licensing. They did exactly what I described and did not hide it when they invited existing content providers to contribute prior to deployment. They actually explained their reasoning and why only certain composers would be invited. It was basically a lure to bring new customers. As Envato stated, they also indicated that they might expand it later on. As far as I know, they did not.
Everything I stated in my post all pends on Envato using the model I described. Otherwise, I fully agree with many others that this would not be a good model to follow.
As far as the marketing research, it’s all over the internet. There are many studies covering several subscription service models and their effectiveness. All that I read are from the perspective of the company and not the content providers. It covers software as a service, digital assets, music, etc. The vast majority has been positive…for the company. It can vary for content providers and obviously, can be very bad with some content providers allowing themselves to be exploited.
I do know some composers who have participated in and benefited from subscription models specifically for production music, but not this type of revenue sharing model. One is part of an artist collective that is working together as a small library with a subscription service. The artist collective situation basically amounts to revenue sharing at one point, but not as we typically look at it on a site like this one because it’s not a massive library with thousands of composers and there is a basic “salary” before any revenue splits kicks in from the subscriptions. They also do custom music, post production, etc. The other composer is commissioned and providing work-for-hire content, so he’s paid upfront by the company that owns the assets. He keeps songwriter’s performance royalties as part of the agreement, so nothing is lost in the case of broadcast. The company takes the publishing, but that is how it generally works in the music library business outside of marketplaces.
Subscription services for production music alone are already out there and they are taking off. I wish it wasn’t, but as composers, I don’t think we’re going to have a choice because the cat is already out of the bag, running down the street and about to hop on a train. Some companies are trying their best to find a good model that will work for music licensing. Again, there is more than one model for that and some are probably better than others. I my opinion, they probably work best if in tandem with single track licensing for commercial and broadcast and the subscription is limited to non-commercial or non-profit use.
There is plenty to be made from YouTube via subscription, and that can be divided into tiers based on channel size and views. As the channel size grows, the subscription rate goes up. One I’ve seen (and perhaps so have you) is $15/month for basic up to 500K monthly views, $30/month for 500K to 5M monthly views, $150/month for unlimited views and channel size. Broadcast use and commercial use are not allowed in that model. For that, the customer goes to single track licensing starting at $99. I can’t see anyone having a problem there and that company is doing extremely well. Because it is not open for commercial use, large companies still have to go through the single track process. Some models do have what they call “enterprise agreements” with large corporate entities needing a lot of music. That can be very lucrative as they are negotiated.
I’ve tried my best to remain open minded about this because I am from the “old school” and I’ve watched rates drill right through rock bottom into magma. We need to watch out for corporate exploitation because that is VERY real. I have been extremely critical of Envato, and I still am, because of some of their practices. This would have been bad had broadcast use been kept in Elements and it still might be if they expand their offerings to include the higher quality items. I also strongly opposed their old “performance royalty free” model when they did not allow PRO registration and CLEARLY, their default pricing is far too low. But, it seems to me that they do listen to you guys and any misguided or exploitative ideas seem to be reconsidered when you make noise. This is another reason I suspect that Elements is really a lure and a way to reduce marketing costs while making additional revenue from people who leave their subscriptions “turned on” every month.
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And NOISE we must continue to make because as I have said a million times, It is only willing artists who agree to devalue themselves and their works. Great Post AA Media. You nailed it on every level.
When I see a customer like this;
http://www.brandonespyphoto.com/about/
Today throw down $49 for a track, this clearly proves my point, our customers are more than willing to pay for a license for a marketing project or presentation project that adds value to them and their brand. Our customers are not asking for a massive cost savings option.
When will music producers finally stop acting like cheap worthless prostitutes with 0 dignity? Will they ever?
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That is pretty much exactly what I said… if you include the other parts that weren’t quoted! The point of that part of the post was just to say that you can’t enter descriptions on Elements.
That’s not at all how I read your post but okay.
But they are asked to do that… you’ve been told that a few times.
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But what’s the point of this info/data, if we authors do not have access to it? Since Envato notoriously do not enforce their license terms, then what is this data for?
Well that’s a different question, one I don’t know the answer to. But I’d assume Envato collect subscriber details for the same reason they collect marketplace buyer details… obviously minus the providing it to authors part.
I think this sums up very well a possible solution for protecting the marketplaces, long term. We want at least companies to stay with the marketplace the coming years.
Do you have any intentions to integrate the marketplace with Elements in the future @jamesgiroux ? I do understand you want customers to browse seamlessly around in the Elements world without accidentally falling out. But providing some tiny keys to the marketplaces, like for example info/links to authors marketplace portfolios would be a great way to spill a little earnings and also marketing to the marketplaces.
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" obviously minus the providing it to authors part."
And exactly why? WHY would the customer information who is licensing not envato’s music, but the music producers music be withheld from the OWNER of the content?
If Envato wants to behave as if they are dealing content they own, then they should buy it or create it themselves. And to those invited 100 authors in the other private thread, are you demanding that information? Do you not want to see who is “licensing” your music and for which type of project?
Do you not want a copy of every license granted?
Basically Envato has to demand that every time someone clicks “download” they are directed to add license and they must input their name, address, etc…for EVERY download. When the music is being licensed for an incredibly cheap price (practically nothing) There has to be a level of inconvenience/ hardship in exchange for fractions of pennies compensation. Every author should be entitled to a copy of the license. If the customer can pull off downloads instantly with minimal data about why they are downloading a track, they will exploit the opportunity to round up a bunch of music for future projects.
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