Well said!
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My opinion, they just killed the market.
Audiojungle was my only source of income.
Now I do not know what to do. No sales.
I write new tracks, but they do not buy, 0 sales on each. New tracks are not needed, I just waste my time working on them. Thank you very much Envato, when we were partners and earned together, now only Envato earns
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I wrote this in Sales Monitor so I just copy paste it:
I sell about 30% less tracks than year ago, I have circa 30% less views but thanks to ADP and higher prices I do not have any drop in earnings. Two months ago I had best month ever.
I’m especially happy with my “premium” unique and less commercial tracks which have prices between 40-100$ and attract buyers with bigger wallet. I do not sell lots of them, they are just a nice and satisfying addition which can be higher in the future. Though it’s a small but (I hope) perspective addition.
In my opinion this might be a way for some authors who would like to focus more on a high quality niche (e.g. video games) than mass yt video audio backgrounds. ADP made this model more profitable so I expect growing number of such authors and buyers. This would need time, especially convincing new buyers that AJ is not only an ukulele-corpo-trailer-drone-stomp library.
Also some changes in AJ UI would be helpful as current system favors popular genres and makes it hard to find unique high quality tracks.
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James, are you really worried about sales? Why then can your tracks be downloaded at unimaginably low prices on elements? With all my love for Envato (thank you so much for the motivation to work and the opportunity to earn), I see no special prospects for the near future right now on audiojungle. Tons of tracks of the same type. The search system is so arranged that you can earn only by stamping tracks on templates, and this is all welcomed Envato. In cinematic it’s already a tradition to sell tracks for $ 5. Are you surprised at low sales? Strange question …
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Trouble is, now, with Elements, even if it proves to be less profitable overall for the contributors on that platform, it may become harder and harder for the authors there to abandon ship, as it gains more traction from the regular Audio Jungle customers, owing to the fact that there will always be someone else waiting to take their place should they walk away from it. It’s sad because now that we’ve been given our own price tag guns, sixty to eighty per cent of whatever we choose to sell our music for is a sweet deal. Fifty per cent of a small portion of whatever Envato decide to sell the subscriptions for isn’t. I really wish Envato would re-think the pricing strategy for Elements (like, increase it ten-fold) and separate the company from the marketplaces completely. They are two entities in direct competition with each other, but at the moment, Elements is completely parasitic. If there was an ad-banner for P5 in the checkout page for my latest track, it would be unthinkable. It’s no different with the Elements banner from my point of view.
With all that being said, I don’t think Elements can be blamed for all of these sales woes. Customers recently have had to deal with their credit accounts being ham-fistedly taken away from them with next to no communication about it; and the change from the fixed pricing scheme that they’re used to, to one—from their point of view—that has no real logic to it. Couple those points with the increasingly laborious task of sifting through the ever-increasing swamp of copycat template tracks to find the good stuff that’s being shoved deeper and deeper into the murky depths which is the outdated and unintuitive search engine, where all the tracks have the same name… I can imagine there may be a few previously stalwart customers looking elsewhere at the moment.
If Envato would even attempt to fix some of the issues regarding copycat author profiles and some of the functional issues with the search engine, instead of trying to just make it look prettier, it would be a big help I think. Being such a ball-ache to find a track must be a huge factor in the decision to shop with a more concise platform like Elements.
@Flumen I really hope that your theory is the way things really are, and it’s encouraging to hear that there are people who are living largely unaffected by, and indeed thriving, despite all of these recent changes. It would be a great thing if sales in the jungle were being spread more evenly across the bread-slice rather than being scraped off by the competition’s knife.
I also agree wholeheartedly with your thoughts about sales numbers being irrelevant. When you think of it being the tool used to rank authors, it’s kind of ridiculous when you compare the paw badges of the top 3.
I always enjoy your positive, common-sensical posts and I ought to take a leaf out of your book really. Perhaps it’s not all doom and gloom here at the moment.
I’m just angry that a supposedly community-focused company like Envato could make the decision to so heavily devalue the hard work that authors put in, and devote such effort to enticing customers away from a platform that so recently made the great decision to put the power of pricing in the hands of the people whom that hard work belongs to. $16.50: a steak and a pint, or: all of the stock music, footage, photos, graphics and web templates that you’re likely to need for all your business’s promotional content and/or commercial services this month. I just can’t see how the stock production community as a whole can possibly benefit from such a crazy deal.
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Keyword “supposedly”. Elements has shattered that marketing spin illusion permanently.
Elements only works if authors agree to participate. To all again, if you want the one off/ individual sync license model to last forever, and I really do believe we all want that, don’t join subscription models. Sell 1 sync license at a time. It really is still profitable. Customers do not like giving companies their credit card to just auto charge away monthly forever. I know I don’t like to subscribe or be on “auto pay” for all bills. Resist subscription models and then it will not become the norm.
Do your part in keeping our business alive and healthy. The responsibility really is on us. We need to almost unionize and define the wage structure ourselves. Just believe in yourself, your worth, and your product.
Who would really want to see selling sync licenses disappear? The only thing that can and will kill sync license sales is authors foolishly thinking that subscription is a better deal. It’s not a better deal. Don’t participate. I really am making more revenue each month with my pricing strategy. Try it. Really, it is working like a charm.
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+1
+1
One thing that is certain in this business is change. It’s ok to celebrate those big breaks in your career but don’t waste time reflecting on them. If it’s no longer working, update & adapt.
Unfortunately a few people have completely missed the point of this thread.
Things change. That’s obvious (and old) news. For this who don’t understand this thread, I am not talking about the sales of my own tracks on the Popular Files list. On the contrary, I’m actually thrilled it’s still selling the amount it is per week. It’s almost 3 years old!
What I am talking about is the overall sales across the Popular Files list. For those who aren’t aware or haven’t been around here to know any different, the average sale count per item on this list was at least 1.4-1.5x higher this time last year, and the years before that. Yes ADP is a factor here, but yet there are tracks whose prices have not changed at all, and their weekly sales have still dropped.
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Two reasons come to my mind : 5 dollar tracks and Elements
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Yes, you are right, weekly sales( and others too) have dropped. It’s because part of our customers download plenty of tracks for free from elements. Afraid it will be worse than now, when almost all customers will move to elements and more authors will join there. But it was more than obvious from the beginning, isn’t it?
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I don’t know about popular files, but generally, I’m shocked what I hear approved here and I see this as one of the main problems of oversaturation and overall bad market reputation. Do we really need almost a million tracks available for sale? The review team should make approvals at least 5 times harder and automatically delete tracks with 0 sales/year. The only market where is easier to get approved track is P5, and they are complete garbage, honestly.
I’ve been checking out some AJ competitors lately, and it’s like a completely new planet. Music is produced/mixed/mastered by radio-standards and it’s something I would actually want to listen in real life.
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I’ve been saying that Elements is the main cause a long time ago but everytime I did a moderator had arguments that is not Element is not the cause.
I still beleive Elements is the main cause.
For examlple I had a client who subscribed to Elements because one of my plugins is there instead of buying it form the marketplace.
To be honest as a buyer Elements is a gold mine, for the author is a disaster.
Is hard to say what the future will bring, all we can do is to fight on.
Harda times ahead
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I don’t think Elements is the only reason for drop in popular tracks list and new items, but I certainly think it’s the biggest reason. The fairytale about a whole new market focus is getting old. Maybe this will happen if Envato starts advertising on YouTube, which I truly hope.
But for now, this is what’s happening:
Source: 2018 Envato Annual Public Impact Statement
Notice the word “switch”. Also notice the aggressive advertising everywhere.
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But 100,000 subscribers seems a small percentage considering that AJ has 5.3 million visitors (according to similarweb)
These numbers vary a lot as far as I’ve seen. In the public statement I linked above it says 2+ million purchased across the Market and Elements last year. And AJ might be 5-10% of this customer mass or something?
In this case, if there are 100,000 subscribers, it means 5-10.000 subscribers for AudioElements. (5-10%)
5-10% percent of the 2 million customers : 100-200,000 for AJ.
This is another super important topic that deserves a new thread, and yes it is certainly also one of the main problems. 25% of all the AJ tracks were approved just the last year. It would be interesting to see the stats for all the years and how it is rapidly increasing. Add in the additional over saturation with Elements and in total it’s quite alarming.
Edit: we have 482k + music tracks (still way to much), so a year ago it was 25% less.
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That is true. I think there will always be people who do participate though because there is potential for those few involved to take a pay check. It’s the old “I’m alright Jack.” and “You gotta do what you gotta do” attitudes. Another classic is “You gotta swim with the tide”.
I hope I’m wrong about that and I do appreciate that you’re trying to change those attitudes.
I definitely agree with that, but without wishing to shirk my responsibilities, I think some of the onus has to be on Envato for irresponsibly offering up this crazy $16.50 deal. The competing subscription websites have prices upwards of 6 times this, for music only (which is still too cheap in my opinion). If Elements is a massive success, it threatens to dominate by massively slashing the overall revenue within the industry, but then dealing it out to a few of it’s “lucky” authors, so a small selected group thrives while the larger group diminishes. This is a pretty unscrupulous business tactic. Envato has to realise this.
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