My theory is that the reviewee, pressured by a time budget, simply listens to 5 seconds of music and makes really superficial assumptions. Most of the review staff are not even real musicians.
I think you’ll find that most actually are musicians if my last 7 years here is anything to go by, but I totally agree with you that we shouldn’t be using AJ as the ‘golden standard’ to compare ourselves to! I also work in higher tier libraries, do film work, some advertising and TV scoring which seem to go down pretty well, so I’m always surprised at what gets rejected or accepted here. There’s no continuity with it really (much like with sales).
Like you, I also had two perfectly good mastered tracks hard-rejected recently and it’s also brought me one decision closer to terminating my AJ account. Why do I hang on? I suppose like everyone else, I’m under the false assumption that ‘my time will come’. It hasn’t though, and 7 years later, during which I’ve spent hours and hours trying to get some traction here, I’m seeing pitiful results despite my tracks selling well elsewhere.
I’ve seen too much politics here over the years to accept that reviewing and curation of bestsellers is an impartial process. It’s highly biased, and if you don’t fit the profile of what Envato want to promote (I certainly don’t being non-exclusive and vocal about my opinions I guess), then you really shouldn’t expect any favours. It’s upsetting as you’d think loyalty and commitment to uploading material to sell on their platform would grant you some chance of success, but really that’s a carrot on the end of a stick that you’re highly unlikely to reach ever in my opinion (and that of many others I’ve spoken to outside of here).
Anyway, the biggest problem with the review process that they need to sort here is that hard rejections come with no feedback whatsoever. Contacting support ends up with staff responding with answers like ‘get feedback on the forums from other authors (who don’t approve works on AJ)’ and ‘don’t feel bad about being rejected, it happens to lots of authors’, which ironically takes longer to type than actually giving a reason for the rejection.