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