I see a big conflict here - if tracks get 2 sales per day and you double the amount of tracks - then all tracks get 1 sale per day. So it also makes sense to limit uploads, don’t you think?
You have to take into the account that all tunes tend to become less important as time goes by. Most of the 10,000 sales / day are divided mostly between the items that have best search visibility throughout the genres. So at any point in time, only a certain amount of your portfolio is “alive”. But the scale is still relevant. If your portfolio is only 20 tunes, only say 10 of them are alive but if your portfolio is 200 tunes, 100 of them might be. The only question that matters is - how probable it is that the customer finds your tune. The smaller the portfolio, the smaller the chance.
Sorry I was trying to make a point but I removed it - I would need more time to think about it but need to go… Later guys.
No worries. All in all the question is, what is the goal and effect of any system that is set up to limit the overall amount of tunes on AJ.
The effect that is now proposed is mechanical limit but it doesn’t necessarily lead to better quality. Only way to actually make sure that the overall quality of AJ is higher would be to make the review system more tight and drop the acceptance rate from the current level without limiting uploads. Now the change mainly affects people who produce good quality material fast and it doesn’t really affect people who work slower already. It also doesn’t force people to make better quality. It only causes trouble to some and no effect on others.
In my opinion it is a wrong way to aim for a different goal.
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totally agree!
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Fully agree, and this is exactly what this market has had more than enough of by now. We already have thousands and thousands of corporate template tracks which all sound similar, clearly the demand does not match supply, so it is only logical to put a lid on this, which is exatly what Envato started doing. No one needs for this to go exponential as even the last authors cotton on to this form of production. Now, if they bring back the tests for new authors that were in place years ago and raise the quality bar in the review process, this might actually lead to something… time will tell.
But in my opinion only good way to go about this would be to tighten the review levels instead of forcing a limit on uploads.
You fail to see the obvious reason WHY those tunes would only get 0-2 sales (even if they’re usable). Because of the current inflow that is TOO LARGE. Envato want to lower this inflow. Therefore, every new track will become more visible.
If you were the only one uploading 5 (usable) tracks in a week surely you would see a lot of those 10,000 sales.
The goal is to lower the inflow of copycat tracks, and the method is right. I think it’s obvious to anyone that out of 1,000 authors producing 1 track/day there may be 1-3 who can and do produce quality, original material, but 997-999 produce the same track over and over, and over, and over, and over, again…
If they prohibited Corporate tracks altogether no buyer would be unhappy because the supply is already perfectly sufficient.
This change will make it better for some (most), and worse for some. Like with ALL changes.
And another thing, the pure QUALITY of a track doesn’t say much, it’s the USABILITY combined with minimum quality that’s important. The top quality super advanced tracks that musicians find interesting and impressive are not necessarily very usable along with video.
I agree with @OuranioRecordings here on a lot of points!
The ‘real’ world shows that all the talk about having one wonderful item that will milk you for years and leaving the customers overly satisfied and buying this track as crazy is plain wrong, come on! That’s simply not true! You’ll more likely have 0 sales and next thought in your head will be you’re not good enough of a musician or a composer (which is also not true) That’s how this marketplace works!
You can spend as much time as you want on a custom produced track when you’re working with a client. I personally spend enough time to make sure client receives exactly what he wants in terms of quality but also it’s my responsibility to deliver it fast enough for him because speed is power this days.
But who actually decides on quality of item’s on AudioJungle beside the review team? How the hell can the speed of your workflow be the determination factor of is your track great quality or garbage? How the instruments that you use in most of your tracks because of they are working for you can make your track garbage?
Aren’t the Envato reviewers team and a customers the ones who actually decide on quality? I guess they are.
And if the music track is not enough quality by any means that are reasonable - then review team should simply reject it. If it’s not good quality for a client he will just go shop some other place.
That’s the way of keeping the marketplace quality on high standards - don’t accept tracks that are not qualified and cleaning up the ‘bad cache’ - no name fake accounts and so, adding verification process and identification, but not limiting the amount of tracks authors can produce.
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Unless I’m missing something here, the 5 upload limit is only a temporary setback for those authors who “need” to upload every day.
Assuming that at some point review times will return to 5 days or less as they were in the past, authors who wish to do so can upload a new track as soon as space is cleared in their queue.
At that point, nothing in effect will have changed.
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@InspiringSound The temporarily set back is actually bad as well for the authors who already had a lot of items in a queue. Now they can wait who knows for how long without an option to upload new music. And later it will be a drop in a music track sales for them because of that. The reason for it is that 'changes came too rapidly and now creating this gap.
And yes I know they can still upload music packs or music kits. 
Maybe announcement could’ve be a good idea, as for me it was out of blue. Not complaining though.
And I believe the right way to go about it is that the REVIEWER decides that this is a copycat track and I don’t accept it. Some people like me actually produce in 20 different genres and most of the time my queue is full of very different tracks. It feels stupid to be in this way forced to slow down just because of copycats when they could be handled without forced limits.
Better option would be for example that you can’t have more than 5 tunes for the same category at the same time if you want to limit the amount of corporate tracks. But that would be worse way than review control.
In my opinion for Envato the best thing to do is to get as many good tracks to their portfolio as fast as possible. This limitation works against that goal. Reviewing is the only system that actually makes a difference when it comes to the question are the tunes good or not.
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Ultimately authors should ask themselves this - How long will it be until the bubble bursts? Regardless of the item quality & super human production skills involved, without restrictions the current model is not sustainable. It’s really as simple as that. And when it does crash what are you gonna do with the 3000 mediocre, similar sounding tracks in your portfolio? Who’s gonna want them? If not for the sake of the marketplace think about your long term plans.
And aside from that, as music creators do we really want to fall into the trap of prioritizing workflow, speed and the daily grind of hitting quotas over the joy and genuine inspiration that forms the basis of great music. Look, I realize that sounds a little romantic and that many here are professionals trying to make a buck. However, as it currently stands the balance is totally skewed.
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I think limiting authors to 5 items in the queue has about 0 negative effect on the long term goal of getting many quality tracks…
If you could sit just one day as a reviewer you would know how much sub-par music is sent in every day that is just purely wasting their time and energy. YOU are probably not the problem, but many others are.
Well said. I think so many are focused on making a quick easy $50 right now and fail to see the big picture. I have a handful of tracks I wrote in 2012-2013 that STILL pay my rent and food. They were never bestsellers (nor corporate) but original enough to not be buried among 40,000 identical clones.
Regulation in this case is a good thing because there are too many spammers in the world who just throw stuff on a wall hoping something sticks…
Any marketplace with the goal to have top quality stuff either limits acceptance of new authors, or number of submissions.
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Well, here’s where the logic gets a little fuzzy 
First of all, what makes a track “good” shouldn’t be confined to the personal beliefs of the producer (or any producer). As you pointed out, some tracks may take off even though a trained ear can pick out several technical weaknesses (sound, harmony, melody, mix, variation etc). Sometimes, or often, a track is selling because it’s relevant and useful in the buyer’s context. While some may adress hitting the “buyer sweet spot” with pure luck, IMO there are ways of researching how tracks are being used and what matters most to the potential buyer. These could be things like intro length, track duration, ending, specific dynamics like crescendos, breaks, etc, but also the general vibe of the track, how it relates to similar popular music at the time, and of course how the track is titled and marketed, when it’s published, what other tracks are competing for the same search terms at the time etc. These are all things that take considerable time to research, and since every (new) track has its own subset of “environmental variables”, putting down that kind of effort may very well be the difference between a track that picks up those important sales early on, and the track that even though it SOUNDS good never catches an audience.
There is also an important snowball effect on AJ where VH items play a big role. Say a popular VH item picks your track for its preview. If the track is great, chances are your following will increase. If the track is only so-so, that never happens. The same can be said with exposure in high end ads, movies and games.
Quantity DOES play a part, I think we all can see it, but it has mainly to do with the way the AJ search engine gives more exposure to new items. One may think that “the more items in the portfolio, the greater the chance of being discovered”, but that is debatable given the low (and dwindling) ratio of a single author output compared to the total influx of new tracks.
In my case, my best sellers are not necessarily the best “sounding” or “most meticulously produced”, but they all share a high level of relevance, usefulness and effectiveness for the targeted market. These are things I cannot completely address to luck alone - when I look at my bottom sellers I can honestly say they mostly lack that “market sparkle” any top seller features.
So, “statistically”, even if that’s a difficult word to use when dealing with subjective musical qualities, I would argue that 10 VERY good tracks definitely would outsell 100 mediocre ones. It’s just not always true for variables like “time spent” or “quality of mix”. Spending your time right - doing the research and nailing the relevant vibe and structure for the targeted buyer - that’s where the real money is.
I said in another thread as well, although no one seemed keen to investigate, that it would be interesting to take a closer look at those “good tracks that never sell” everybody seems to throw around as an argument in case. My theory is that they don’t really exist. Prove me wrong! You can link to an item that most producers go “wow, that sounds great to my ears” and it has zero sales, but I’m betting I could argue as to exactly why that track never found its way into the shopping cart. Most of the times it’s because at the date of approval there were other tracks in the same category/search scope that were BETTER suited for the buyer’s project. Having 100 of those inferior tracks approved in the same week wouldn’t make a big difference, the buyer would still go for the “champion”, the at-all-times-present big seller in the top of the search result list. However, had the track been of noticeably higher relevance/quality, it would have started to steal some sales from the big seller, eventually securing a place on the first page giving steady monthly exposure.
Even more evident is when you manage to find a relatively unpopulated niche, just by comparing the top 5 search results at any given time, the better item is collecting the more sales. But obviously, this debate is fuelled mainly by those who compete in “corporate”, “epic” or “happy” search terms, where the influx of mediocre, similar sounding items is so enormous that any buyer will find it beyond hopeless to find a gem in the landslide. In those cases, then yes, quantity oftentimes beats quality, and it’s really a game of hit or miss even over long periods of time.
I’m invested in this issue mostly because I feel it would be so much better for all of us if this marketplace was shock full of high quality, relevant items, instead of being constantly diluted with fodder. Envato may have had a stroke of genius during launch years, when they first realised the value of having a large number of authors invested in the site. Every approved author were prone to marketing their items externally and driving traffic to the domain. However, it’s debatable whether this strategy is equally efficient at present time, when AJ is a dominant player in the RF audio world, and positioning the brand and retaining existing customers become more important than driving new potential customers into a wall of copy-paste music.
“Hard work” needs to be defined as to include taking care of your market, not simply churning out raw material that gets in the way of your competitors’ exposure. Search result listings are so broad that just about any track can show up on a popular keyword. The more specific the buyer gets (and can get), the more work needs to be done in catering to special requirements. But fine, if an author decides that the game at hand is all about output and volume, go ahead and snatch those random sales. I’m just quite certain it will never add up to compete with the ones doing their homework. You’ll find that every now and then, a random track hits the sky, but if you look at all the equally crafted tracks that never made it, again “statistically” it’s not the best possible strategy.
We all want to believe what we’re doing is the right thing, and we all have our constraints, be it time, production skills or understanding of the market, but I for one hold it to be true that any investment in relevant knowledge and craftsmanship provides you with valuable assets that serve as multipliers of your subsequent returns.
The evidence is in the pudding
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Was that the goal? From what I read Envato mainly wanted to get the reviewing queue down. Items are reviewed one by one and they’ve noticed that a considerable number of authors submit a lot of un-approvable items at once. Those items stack up in the queue and by the time they get their first hard reject, they may have a lot of similar uploads just waiting to score the trash can. By limiting uploads per queue cycle, those authors will have some more time to work on their material, from the point of the first hard reject to the point where they upload again.
I don’t think the copycat issue is the primary target for the new limits, and I don’t think we’ll see less of it as a consequence. If I understand correctly, the number of authors submitting is the same or increasing, and they recently hired more reviewers. Limiting the items in queue does not necessarily limit the number of approved items per day. On the contrary, if this all leads to more authors learning what it takes to be approved, we’ll actually see MORE copycat items as a result. The only thing that can stop low quality to hit the market is to narrow the scope of acceptance.
Yes, that would be interesting, to say the least
The actual " Goal " in all of this is reducing a meaningless cost to Envato. To process 10-15,000 or so music tracks a month costs them money in hiring more reviewers etc.and the figure appears to be growing more and more each week.
Envato aren’t particularly making a significant amount of extra money from all of these extra tracks. I think that most established authors here will agree that everyone is now getting a smaller share of the actual money being spent here.
Envato and it’s authors will probably make the same amount of money with maybe 5000 tracks a month going through Audiojungle.
I’ve looked at the Portfolios of many of the authors who are particularly unhappy about this new initiative and there appears be a trend of having 10 or so “Inspirations”; "Epics "; “Happys” and " Upbeats " within their own librarys. Some authors have made a better job of reworking their own tracks than others. If you can produce 10 "Inspirations " in a few days and sell 10 licences spread across the 10, it’s not a bad tactic in the short term but in the long term it makes the library look like a “cheap scam” with 1,000’s of tracks titled almost the same and sounding very similar. From a buyers perspective it turns the whole thing into a lottery.
At the end of the day, the buyers are simply not there to sustain healthy sales of 15,000 new tracks a month and the rest of the audiojungle back catalogue.
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I’m new here but I really think there should be some limit to the names. So many the same name it seems odd.
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