I mean, the “Music General Acceptance and Sales Tips” article does help to understand what type of music you are looking for, but there’s gotta be a more elaborate vision that your reviewers are all agreeing on right? A more elaborate guideline of what music is acceptable and what is not.
Sometimes it feels so subjective. Almost like you’ve just hired some guy to review tracks, showed him your “guidelines” and then just let him judge for himself what he likes or not.
For example, my focus in music is on niche genres. About 97% of my sales (~40 sales a month now) is on 80’s inspired synth music. Now when I upload my 80’s stuff it feels like I gotta be lucky to get the right reviewer. My quality is consistent, but sometimes a weeks work of 4 tracks all get rejected all in one go. Other times, all 4 get approved in one go. The past weeks I spent on making authentic 90’s dance music, using samples from the drum machines used in that time, using the JD800 and Korg M1 synth, taping everything to my Revox PR99, mastering with opto-compressor similar to how it was done back then, and finally making sure the structure and composition followed your guidelines and making sure the final product is up to modern standards. All my focus is on making the music suit the purpose of the clients.
All rejected without explanation.
Only 1 90’s track got approved, and it was the only one I didn’t care about making it sound authentic but rather used modern VST’s and digital mastering. This was the one that should have been rejected if any.
After a couple of year of selling now I learned that when I “know” something will sell it does, and when I’m “not sure” it can either get really popular or get no sales at all. When these track I “know” will sell gets rejected, I get sort of bummed out.
All I’m saying is that maybe you can elaborate your guidelines a bit, especially on the technical side. Get clearer so that we can really invest our time in making what we know you really need as opposed to wasting our time hoping you will like it. This will also help us to be creative, give us some space to experiment and improve on the current trends. I think that what might be happening now is that many people keep producing the same damn style and sound just because they know that you will accept this style of music. I mean lets face it, do you REALLY need more corporate inspiring music that sounds exactly the same? Maybe your market actually needs some more rare styled music… This will help you find the new trends as well.
Right now when I go through the most active Audiojungle genres, it sort of feels like going back to 2010. Maybe, just maybe, it would be beneficial for you to look more towards what might become the next trend as opposed to what you know has sold in the past. Don’t get stuck in 2010 Envato!
Also I sort of feel that the reviewers are overlooking these things:
- Is the music dynamic? Super loud square waveforms does absolutely no good on YouTube’s volume normalization. Dynamic music is professional, competing in loudness is very unprofessional
- How well does the music suit its purpose, is it enhancing the feeling of the media that it’s made for? 60’s music may sound weird with 2016 styled mastering. (everything doesn’t have to sound sharp and digital!)
- Is it conflicting with the vocal frequency range? Most of the customers here I am sure wants the ability to talk over the music, maybe add to your guidelines what this frequency range is and how you don’t want it disturbed.
Alright now my rant is done. I’m sure most of you disagree with me since I’m not focused on Corporate or Inspiring, but still I felt I wanted to share my own feelings here a bit.
Edit: Oh and I’d like to add one question. Why do we not get a comment on reason for rejection? I’ve heard it being said that it takes too much time. But really? Just typing “guitar is out of sync”, or “samples sounds outdated”, “claps sounds unnatural”, or “instruments is colliding”, or even “whole composition sounds unprofessional”. If you listen to a track for a couple of minutes, why can’t your reviewers take 2 seconds to write a comment? Or is it perhaps that they don’t know what is wrong?