The AJ Community Guide #1: How to find projects with your music
It’s not easy to find projects which use tracks you have sold on AudioJungle. Read this chapter to learn how to find them! Generally speaking, you can make it manually by using data from invoices or by using automated services like TuneSat or CID partners like Identifyy (Haawk).
Let’s take a look at the manual search.
Most purchases are made by:
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companies and institutions
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marketing/event agencies
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video/animation/sound studios and developers
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individual professional buyers like sound engineers, directors, company owners etc.
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individual amateur buyers like youtube content creators
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others like venues, podcasters, live performers etc.
Go to “statement” tab and check invoices for any useful data. If company buys music by themselves, you can find the name of company on the invoice. So if you see e.g. “Adidas” with Spanish address below - just try to find your music on Spanish Adidas website, Facebook page and especially Youtube or Vimeo channel. You can also check international Adidas pages and channels. Be patient, sometimes content is published one or few weeks (even months!) after the purchase. Remember that some buyers do not publish their content on the internet.
Unfortunately purchases are made usually by hired creators/agencies or individual buyers. In this scenario we don’t know name of the brand but we can search internet for those creators. For example if you have on your invoice “Stinky Dragon Media Agency” try to find their portfolio and recent releases. So again, go to Youtube and Vimeo channels, Facebook page, websites. And again, do not expect that they always have regularly updated portfolio.
The smallest chance to manually find music is when buyer writes on invoice only his name and part of address.
But what if you have found a buyer, name of his brand, his websites and channels but you can’t find video with your music? You can always mail him with polite question about the project with your music. Unfortunately buyers frequently do not respond, especially if they are big companies. If your mail isn’t enough “official”, they might not forward it to relevant department/staff member who bought your track. But often you might get lucky. And please remember that we do not want to harass buyers so try to mail mainly those buyers who have bought broadcast licenses or very “intriguing” other licenses.
Another way to manually find your music in the internet is to google name of your song, your name, IPI number or whatever text is connected with your item. Some buyers credit composers in the description so you can find it on Youtube, Vimeo etc. This is especially useful when registered with CID, as ContentID adds a snippet with the author name in the Youtube video description. E.g. Identifyy (Haawk) works like a charm in finding such videos.
Another few tips:
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you can also check if someone has used your track in template or promo video on VideoHive. Go there and search in the browser your nick or track name. You will find only those items which have those words in their description
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go to Google Analyze ( https://envato.com/blog/getting-started-google-analytics/ ) connected with your Envato account and check source of visits on your pages, eventually go to Analytics on your item page and check referrals
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you can monitor other stocks for a plagiarisms of your track, especially if you have bestsellers. Sometimes those plagiarised items have even the same name!
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data which you see on invoices is partly anonymized by system, you can only see first letter of name and the exception of address
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sometimes buyers have different names of their brands/Youtube channel/Facebook Page/etc. than official name they use on invoice
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even if your track hasn’t been bought to use in the internet media, there is still chance to find it… in the internet. For example just think of video reviews of movies, games, applications, events. (BTW people can legally use your music in reviews, educational sources, parodies etc. without a license and your permission!)
Unfortunately buyers data which we see on the invoice often makes us unable to find projects with our music. Adding “project name” field to the buyer’s purchase form can solve this problem, even if it’s optional. That’s the issue we should raise in discussion with Envato.
Is it worthy to spend time on manual searching? It depends on how many tracks, what type of licenses and what kind of music you sell. Try it and draw your own conclusion, especially if you want to have bigger portfolio.
Thankfully there are also automated systems which can find projects with your music.
Let’s take a look at TuneSat https://tunesat.com/tunesatportal/home
TuneSat is an online service which scans satellite television in USA and 13 European Union countries. It means that theoretically it can find your music whenever it has been broadcasted in a TV in those countries. The most important thing is that TuneSat offers a free account (you can upload maximum 50 tracks for free and it can make 50 free detections each month). This technology isn’t 100% efficient and scans only 14 countries but it’s the best semi-free TV monitoring service we know. It can show you data of broadcast with your music including: name of TV station, time, name of show, and even audio recording of the broadcast.
If it finds commercial with your music, it will not display the name of it. But listen to the voiceover from the recorded audio file so you can catch the name of the brand and the campaign. Google it, search Youtube and you have chance to find the video with your music.
If TuneSats finds your music, check your statement and make sure that buyer has bought proper broadcast license! If not, contact him to clear this issue.
Another useful tools are Youtube CID partner services like Identifyy (Haawk) https://www.identifyy.com/
In a few words, it’s a system which can scan Youtube for videos with your music and verify if the content creator has license for your track. If not, you can monetize ( = you can earn money!) or even block his video. CID system also allows PRO to collect royalties (more about PRO royalties in the next chapter). Unfortunately Youtube CID system doesn’t scan tracks shorter than 30 seconds (e.g. logos and short edits) and does not allow registering public domain tracks.
And now last but not least! One of the Envato authors @baileyherbert has created Enseek - a great tool for an automatic finding of VideoHive projects with our music.
It’s simple! Just go to Enseek https://bailey.sh/enseek/authors/signin, register and voila! It will find most of projects with your music (but not logos and kits) basing on the description and audio fingerprinting technology. @Baileyherbert we all thank you for this useful tool!