First of all I think everybody who is contributing with new high quality tracks should tap themselves gently on the shoulder. New items recently won the customers interest over the best sellers in this experiment.
So the good news is that new music tracks are in demand and of high relevance. More good news is that the average price for single track music licensing are steadily going up on other stock music sites, and I would be very surprised if the average price is not going up on AudioJungle as well. Itâs easy to spot the reckless price dumping, but it seems to me that more and more authors are realising they can earn respectable earnings on their music.
So what is the problem with new tracks? The problem is that just in the last day 511 (!) music tracks were approved on AudioJungle. For anyone who has been following the experiment with the category pages, one can clearly see how much the category pages affects the visibility and sales of new items on other market places. If you look at the most high traffic genres, corporate and epic, the first 2-3 pages are filled with tracks from the latest day. Which means we are not talking about days for new items on the first page of the category pages, we are talking hours.
The last year 119 238 tracks have been added to AJ. The total number of tracks since 2008 is 500 558. That means 23,8% of total tracks were published just last year. This is just wildly insane. The other 76,2% were published the previous ten years or so, I assume with increasing intensity each year.
From a customers perspective, they clearly want new and fresh items. They also want better discoverability to help them find the perfect track for their project. So the question then arises, is it helpful for the customers flooding them with options? Would it actually be better for sales conversion with less options and stricter upload control/less submissions? Would 50 music tracks approved each day be better for customer experience than 500?
From an authors perspective, do the current over saturation just encourage more over saturation? I know that for quite some years many authors see pumping up tracks in relentless quantities as the chosen strategy to grab some visibility. That may have worked well in the old days, but does it really work in the same way nowadays? Or does it just make the situation worse for both customers discoverability AND authors earnings per track? Does it create a market and a search engine that favours quantity over quality in an evil endless circle?
I assume Envato have thought about this and are hopefully planning some actions that can deal with what seems to be the biggest challenge of all now at AudioJungle.
But I am curious what authors think about this. One thing is for 100% sure, AJ needs stricter review process for new authors ASAP. Maybe something similar to what was recently implemented to stock footage?
As for upload limits I personally think these should be reduced for every author, new and old, Elite or not. At the very least in the more high traffic genres. This would free up time for the reviewers to do other tasks, like for example reviewing new authors, reviewing/removing old low quality portfolios, inactive portfolios, delete copycats, etc etc.
Another tweak that can be done is creating more sub categories, in Funk/Groove and Hip Hop for example there are no sub categories.
To introduce a Game Music category with sub categories would also target a huge market (especially mobile games) and also help authors think a little outside the corporate box. More categories would for sure be an easy tweak to help customers quickly find their perfect track.
Please share your thoughts as well, if you agree or not.
Thanks!