Broadcast licenses... yet again!

Envato Authors AudioJungle
41

Is it legal? Sure. Is it allowed as per Envato’s terms and policies? Certainly not. Is it a lame way to appear more competitive while giving the finger to your whole community? You bet it is!

However:

You cannot make that assertion. Depending on the case, buyers may be responsible for paying performance royalties. Some broadcasters are indeed buyers here. Restaurant or bar owners are responsible for paying performance royalties. Some of them exclusively buy performance royalty-free music because they want to avoid paying PROs. Same thing with event planners,… These cases are in the minority of course, but they do exist.

As for AdRev, this is fear mongering plain and simple. No there is no legal issue when using AdRev registered music. Envato has asked several authors to remove such texts (those texts were very similar to this one… same author?). Since non registered music, especially those that are advertised as such, are easy target for claim usurpers, they absolutely cannot guarantee there won’t be any issue, as legal problems do arise from such situation where author is not the claimant.

You should definitely report the author to support. But I don’t think this has any impact on the type of broadcast license buyers choose.

42

@BenLeong It’s now been 2 weeks since you told us you were looking into this broadcast license issue. Where are you at with it?

When can we expect a serious clarification of the terms regarding the audience size? (putting the adjective “intended” in bold does nothing to clarify what it means)

If you personally don’t want to take care of this, can we at least have a designated staff member we can exchange on the matter with?

1 Like
43

Yes, you are right, but there is Royalty free music, not Performance Royalty Free music and it changes everything. I don’t know if it’s common, but in my country restaurant or bar owners paying a blanket license fee for everything they play no matter what it is, not for a specific piece of music, except if it is some event or concert etc. then they have to point out all tracks being performed… unless they buy performance royalty-free license for music from a service providing that type of music and play it as a background music. If this author can’t provide a proper license for performance royalty free music, all owners of restaurants, bars will have to pay additional fees anyway, because they can’t show to their PRO that this is not their jurisdiction.

44

Not only wrong, but also misleading. It labels Authors who are registered with AdRev and PROs as dishonest and dubious while this is absolutely not true. These systems help us to get payed and prevent our music to get stolen.

This is Incredibly bad class.I have no idea who this top seller is, but this Author needs to be checked out by Envato support. Seems like putting items to 5$ isn’t enough anymore. Unprofessional.

1 Like
45

@BenLeong, it’s been 11 days since my last post. No response from you whatsoever. Now, I know you have more important things to do, such as set up the Halloween costume contest, but this is important as well.

You told us in this very thread, about a month ago, that you were going to involve different teams to tackle the issue. Where are you guys at? Which teams are involved in this? Are there going to be talks with authors? Can we have an ETA at least on the rewording of the “audience size”?

Please don’t ignore us. This issue could be fixed very easily. There is no reason for Envato to slow things down like you guys are doing. In the meantime, we are losing money, maybe that’s acceptable for your company. For authors, it can mean the difference between eating or starving.

5 Likes
46

11
Skjermbilde 2018-11-08 kl. 09.03.11.png628×683 33.7 KB

Above is the recommended prices for a normal track versus a music kit. They are both showing VERY low max prices in the recommended range. I would say though the Music kit prices looks a little more healthy compared to normal track pricing.

@BenLeong The point is: Could the recommended prices be updated all together? At least the max recommended number. As mentioned earlier in this thread, just remove recommended prices at all could maybe work too. Right now the recommended prices make more harm than good because of the super low price roof. Times have changed and AJ is not just the MacDonald´s of music licensing anymore, people also come here to browse unique and outstanding high quality music they can´t find anywhere else.

For example instead of $15-$20 Recommended Music Standard License, it could be $15-$59 or $20-$99 or something like that. We have a competition site that sells $99 tracks as a standard price to put it in perspective. All the max recommended prices are way to low in all licenses, at the minimum double/triple these max recommended prices to reach something acceptable.

Yesterday I sold a Music Broadcast License (1 million) for $199. Last month @PurpleFogSound sold a Film and Broadcast License for $999. These are examples of the kind of money Envato and Authors are loosing out on because of the unclear broadcast presentation. Not to mention all the money that is lost by the current $20 max recommended Music License Standard price which most authors “blindly” follow!

Thank you so much for diving into this Ben! These small changes can make a big difference for all of us.

1 Like
47

Ten more days have passed, and still not a word from you @BenLeong!! It’s been over a month since you posted in this thread, what’s going on?! Communication breakdown!

First, let me tell you that your completely ignoring authors like you’re doing in this thread is very rude and unprofessional. Thank you for showing us the contempt envato has for their authors.

The issue at end is both consequential for authors and easily fixable by Envato. The clarification of the audience size only requires some small text modifications. It does not require modifications in the interface, there is no coding involved, and most importantly it doesn’t go against your business model. So why isn’t anything done? Is it just due to incompetence, or is there something more sinister at play here?

To my fellow authors, this issue concerns all of us. We are being cheated out of a lot of money, because of this. Every time you sell a 1 million broadcast license, you’re most likely losing on what you should be owed. This situation should not be allowed. There is no other reason for this other than Envato’s apathy. We pay a hefty author fee, yet we’re not getting a run for our money, if we’re not getting even basic communication, and a licensing system that’s clear and respected.

7 Likes
48

@PurpleFogSound I realise that you are frustrated by this, but please consider that throwing around accusations of contempt and incompetence are out of line here. I’ve raised this with our product managers, but have not had any further developments to post about in this thread.

Please take this to official channels via the support centre: open a ticket and the Author Support team will follow up on this for you.

I have attempted to help via internal contacts out of empathy and respect for all the authors in this thread, but I am not your best contact point: while I can raise issues with other teams and advocate for community concerns, my primary focus is on community marketing activities and major campaigns.

1 Like
49

I’m not throwing accusations, I’m merely describing how your behavior makes us authors feel. What did you expect, after a month of you completely ignoring us? If you think that’s out of line, that’s your issue. These words, “contempt” and “incompetence”, that seem to have stung your pride, are the only thing that made you finally react and give us your status.

Who are they? Are they the people who have a say on this issue? Why haven’t they contributed to this thread? Can we have contact with them?

This is definitely not what you’ve shown us in this thread.

Honestly, I learned about your role yesterday thanks to a post of one of your colleague. We authors have no Envato contact anymore, we don’t know who to turn to.

I did know this was far from your domain of expertise, which is why I asked several time for the right contact who actually could help us on this issue:

Anyway, thank you for wasting our time.

50

Hi @benleong

+1 for having a product manager invited to this thread. Of course a help ticket can be opened but a lot of information get lost this way since we are a little group of authors in this thread who have ideas, small very doable ideas on how to improve things, rather quickly. We see the problem from different perspectives and can brainstorm in more constructive way if we have the discussion for further approach here in this thread I think.

Most of the ideas are really small and easily implementable, such as having the text in the different licenses changed a little. Just those tiny ideas like to have No Broadcast use in bold letters at the Music Standard License would have a positive impact.

Thanks!

2 Likes
51

@BenLeong I am sorry that you’ve felt offended. I understand your role and I am very thankful for your voluntary activeness on forum.

Please understand our point of view. Many community-active authors are frustrated because they want to work for the community, they spend a lot of time on proposing improvements and discussing, but usually they have zero feedback from a staff, excluding help center, which is very “corporative” and as short as possible. You are one of the very few who keep contact with us from time to time, which I deeply appreciate.

The biggest problem is that we don’t know who to contact with if we have some important issues to discuss about. So we write it on forum. And usually no one answers (besides of the official Envato posts). This is how frustration grows. I’m not sure how big corporation can solve that problem in such a big community, I’m only pointing it. It looks like authors activeness is way bigger than feedback they receive.

5 Likes
52

Since @BenLeong can’t/won’t do anything about this, nor even give us a relevant contact at Envato, I’m trying my luck with you @steve_lam, as your “role title” says “author engagement”.

Can you have a look at this issue and either fix it, or give us the name and contact of the staff member/team, we can talk to, regarding this.

This issue has been going on far too long. It has dramatic effects on us music authors. It’s really easy to fix. It would be a great way for Envato to damage control their relationship with their author community, and just show you guys care… just a tiny bit.

Ignoring their authors is not a good policy and strategy for Envato. Especially on a subject that’s benign for you guys and so crucial for us.

1 Like
53

Dear @Envato, @BenLeong, @steve_lam,

this thread is nothing to ignore. Listening to your Community will only result in a more prolific Marketplace. Please listen: I’ve had many Customers, predominately production companies who sell their endproducts to big corporations and broadcasters, who are ignoring the licenses here on Audiojungle. Many of them are not only buying just the regular license, I also know that many of these companies talk about Audiojungle in a disgraceful and devalueing way. I’m using tunesat to track my broadcast placements, so I can actually prove that they’ve been using the regular license.

It may not be your primary concern if a Customer doesn’t buy a Broadcast License, since Envato’s revenue seems not to suffer as much as the revenue of us Authors, but granted, we Authors do suffer from this. Just the attempt to change the behaviour of those companies would not only result in more profit (for both Envato and us Authors), but also in how this market would be perceived by the Customers. You did many great things to this marketplace, it’s time to get this straight too.

Thank you for reading.

4 Likes
54

An audience of less than 1 million only really will exist for radio these days or some very restricted tv channels. I’ve sold a few of these licenses over the last few months and have always thought they were ‘wrongly ‘ bought. Either because the client didn’t understand the license or they were being sneaky.
I think i’ll follow the idea that others had and put my 1 million price way higher

1 Like
55

I have just spotted that McCann bought a 1million license from me in June!!! Hmmm.

I’m going to put my 1million license fee up now too!

2 Likes
56

Hi @trent-aus

While we wait for further progress in the broadcast presentation, do you think you could change the text in the standard music license from:

Use in one end product, free or commercial. Most web uses. 10,000 copy limit for a downloaded or physical end product. No broadcast use. The total price includes the item price and a buyer fee.

to:

Use in one end product, free or commercial. Most web uses. 10,000 copy limit for a downloaded or physical end product. No broadcast use. The total price includes the item price and a buyer fee.

In other words only change the No broadcast use to bold letters. I think this would potentially help a little bit for all the wrongly purchased licenses, and I guess you don´t need a consensus from a whole team to this little tweak.

Thank you in advance!

1 Like
57

EDIT: I´m tagging you @steve_lam since you are the one officially active with improvements lately. Hopefully you can pass this compressed information on to the right people. There is a big frustration growing around this since serious money for both Envato and authors are getting lost literally every day for AJ tracks. Especially now after ADP when we can price our licenses respectfully.

The simple text/title switches (like the one in my post above and the first idea under from Purplefogsound) is IMHO no reason to delay any further, these changes will have an immediate positive impact and must be a very quick job for the Envato team.

Thank you so much for pushing this forward!

I have read through this thread again and retweeting what I personally see as the most important ideas, maybe this could help Envato sort out the info from this thread. Any of these ideas will be a big improvement.

This is a very simplistic and effective idea I think. Just rename the 1million/10million/Film and Broadcast licenses —> Broadcast Local/Broadcast National/Broadcast International. This would require very little effort as far as I understand and would eliminate the constant confusion for buyers.

-alternatively “force” buyers to choose a license from the current window, so its by default blank and you can´t finish add to cart before a license is actively chosen.

2 Likes
58

Another useful thing - “Project name” field which buyers should fill during the purchase/invoice data filling. Thanks to this authors will see the name of campaign on invoice instead of the name of buyer/agency/video creator.

59

Without a doubt it is 100% time for Envato to enforce broadcast licenses and properly define them because end usage is not accurately defined. I have incredible amounts of evidence that big companies shop here for big brand, prime time projects. We need end usage check boxes for broadcast. Is the license for:

  1. TV Show
  2. TV Commercials
  3. Network Promo
  4. Film
  5. Infomercial

Then we need “territory” and audience size defined

  1. USA Over 100 Million Viewers
  2. Europe Over 100 Million Viewers
  3. The World 1 Billion Viewers
  4. Regional 50 Million Viewers
  5. Local - 1 to 10 Million Viewers

Will the track be used “in perpetuity”? 1 year? 3 months?

So yes, I just sold a $999 “Music Broadcast and Film” License to a design firm in Korea. But here is my laundry list of questions that sorry, I feel as though I am entitled to answers:

  1. Is this for an ad campaign, tv show, or film?
  2. Where and when will it air?
  3. If Ad campaign, what product? What brand?
  4. Does the client know how to report the end usage to their PRO in their country? and why do I not have an e-mail address to contact this customer to facilitate this?

Envato presents itself as a “selling platform” where we’re all in business for ourselves but we use the “platform” to obtain customers. Since this is the case, please create check boxes so we know how the music is used especially for the top tier broadcast licenses. Finally why is the information on the invoice just presenting name of company and city, country the firm is in? How about name of buyer, address of company, and contact e-mail address of the buyer?

Envato needs to understand that these kinds of licenses can, do and will result in thousands of dollars more in performance royalties to rights holders. In some cases it is tens of thousands of dollars.

Envato you are no longer just chasing after “small youtubers”, there are big companies here but you seemingly do not want to help us. Why? what happened to “When the community succeeds we all succeed”?

What we are asking for is not incredibly demanding. We just want more information about end usage from the top broadcast license. Why should anyone be deprived of thousands more in performance royalties? Please, take those broadcast licenses more seriously and require that the customer give more thorough information about that license. When music is getting used by fortune 500, multi-national brands in their ad campaigns you need to take that very seriously. I strongly encourage PZ, Tim, James, Soundroll, etc and all reviewers to dial up the pressure on this. Really folks…this is not a huge demand.

Here is a fun fact: I have earned more money in performance royalties from ONE AJ license that morphed into a massive ad campaign than I have in 3 years of activity on AJ. One ad campaign’s performance royalties resulted in 3 years of total earnings at AJ and it very well may continue for 3 years. Not done getting paid yet. This also happened because the customer was professional and helpful and reached out because they knew it was going to be big.

3 Likes
62

MykeRoss, composers can chase after whomever they want to and only stupid one’s will chase after the bottom. Seriously man, this was a real eye opener selling that license to Korea. Possibilities are endless here. I honestly never expected to sell a 999 license, but it only took 3 months and it happened. I believe purple frog sold one too.

In studying this company’s web site, the brands they do a lot of work for are Samsung and Lexus. These are big, big brands. I’d really like to collect my performance royalties from these behemoth advertisers Envato, but you are not providing me with a buyer name and direct e-mail address. And no, things should NOT be “cheap and easy” for Lexus and Samsung!