Have you seen the “top new files”?
What do you think about it?
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Disgusting.
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What’s not to worry about? How is their not making money on those amounts a good thing for responsible authors? They’re still selling at those prices. And buyers are getting those cheap tracks instead of reasonably priced items.
Shame on all of them.
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Just remove the illogical focus on sales numbers that is on display everywhere. Change the focus to earnings, or ideally, to nothing at all, just “popular”. And the problem is solved. Let people lower the price to $1 if they want to make $0. It wouldn’t matter.
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It’s just running on pure desperation and nothing else. People think that if they release a tune at $5 it will take off and get those 15 sales and end up in popular files. The strategy does not work. Desperation does not make you money either.
I had to see for myself too what may happen. So back around November 15, I dropped 5 older Christmas tunes to $5 for just 1 week. I sold a couple of them. One of them sold maybe 5 times that week. I made $5. It was a humiliating experience and I will never do it again. I would have felt better just giving away the tracks to those buyers. What a waste of time.
Either you believe in yourself and your product or you don’t. You are either in business to make money or you are not. News flash: the $5 scheme to hit popular files page will fail you. Don’t even try it. It truly is amazing how much stupidity, low self esteem, and just plain ignorance exists from many authors dealing in this market.
For those who are desperate for any kind of sale or penny earned, and are taking an approach of " I’ll do anything to earn anything" use the exact opposite strategy and move upward…you probably will just earn more revenue and that should really be all you are focused on.
Can anyone here say they’ve had more revenue success by lowering prices? I know many of us, including me, have stated that their revenue went up when they did the exact opposite.
Sorry if people find my comments offensive, I just have to say it the way I see it.
If you do not care about making money off your assets and will take just about anything anyone will give to you at all costs, why exactly are you putting forth time and effort into this business?
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everything matters. It leads the market to nowhere and devalues the music.
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You missed my point.
If having high sales numbers is not something that is rewarded with a spot in the Popular Files list and search, no one would price their tracks at $5. Or $1 if it was allowed.
The problem is not free pricing. The problem is rewarding sales numbers. If earnings were instead rewarded, the ultimate market price would evolve. And it would not be $5.
It makes absolutely no sense to reward sales numbers when there is free pricing.
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I totally agree
Not exactly. Discussion about pricing is ok unless it’s price fixing. In this post I haven’t seen any price fixing, only:
- analyzing current pricing of some authors
- talking about future updates of pricing system, not about pricing set by sellers
+1 for this. Trends, sorting and search engine should be focused on earnings instead of sales and problem is solved.
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Absolutely.
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+1. “Best Match” should be distributed on the amount of money earned from the new track, and not on the number of sales (because the number of sales “today” means nothing).
For example, a new track that was bought 1 time for a large license for $1500 should be in the search for definitely higher than the track that was bought 20 times for $5! This is a more honest search in my opinion for new tracks that buy. It will also exclude all authors from the correct search who disrespect their tracks (and the music business in general) and distribute them “like bread for chickens” and will give way for earnings, to those authors who want to earn.
Something like that, all good luck and profits! 
$$$
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Yes to focus on earnings in the search engine will minimise this problem, as well as help against the focus on just relentlessly pumping in tracks to “survive” in the current search engine I believe. Quality and healthy prices would arise in the search result, there is absolutely no doubt about this. As a bonus I think we possibly would see less over saturation and copy cats.
It seems like authors are very united in this revenue idea: Idea for search algoritm update
I doubt that Envato would remove sales numbers completely because they still rely on that “numbers convince customers”, so maybe a mix of revenue/sales number can be a solution. Though I hope Envato learns about buying behaviour in Elements, and maybe conclude that showing sales numbers is not that important for music.
As for the motivation to price dump, it’s not about money, people use this tactic to get trending and then revert to more healthy prices amongst other shady tactics. In my opinion the trending function should be disabled unless it gets updated with new triggers for activation. Right now, price dumped tracks partly gets trending because other angry authors are clicking on them giving them views and plays…Quite ironic.
I’m worried that the new Category pages experiment’s Envato is introducing, is only going to worsen the abuse of the trending function and drive authors to do more price dumping: Category Page Experiments
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Absolutely!
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Need to change the system. In the search, those items that have a higher price and which have brought more money to the author and the market should benefit
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This is the jungle… 
Yeah, that’s pretty shocking… Something should be done about this, Envato is turning into a second Fiverr.
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This my nightmare coming true… i really, really dislike how cheap this looks.
Have some damn selfrespect and respect your work… this is garbage.
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They have no respect for their work and no respect for other authors.
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This is really sad story with $5 price. Meanwhile sales are dropped dramatically this month.
I enjoy a good quote of irony from time to time. This one is gold! Really, really good point.
I agree with all the issues with sales numbers being the main competitive focus.
As Flumen said These figures have become even less relevant since ADP. I guess from Envato’s point of view, sales numbers are an easy way to indicate a track’s popularity. I just wish they would stop doing the easy thing and start doing the right thing.
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