Hey all. Just posting this for those who are new and might be frustrated by rejections. We are a team of myself (studio musician, 10x songwriting award winner), and a Grammy-nominated producer/mixer based in New York. I handle the account for us. The first track we uploaded won ‘Best Instrumental Song’ in the 2019 Great American Song Contest. It was accepted. I uploaded five more, all of equal quality, and two out of the five were accepted (the two least interesting ones in our opinion). The others were hard rejections. And they were good. I’m talking New York studio, paid session musicians, top notch production/mixing/mastering. So… goodbye AudioJungle, I tried, but I can’t be working my a** off on a track for a week only to wait three weeks just to have some college kid tell me it’s not good enough. Peace.
Just going to jump in here and say there’s no need to insult the reviewers. They too are professionals, one of them being a Grammy nominee if I recall correctly.
If your tracks were rejected and you’re who you claim to be, it’s unlikely it was down to production quality. It’s far more likely to be an issue with structure and complexity.
Chances are if you’re making competition-winning instrumentals, they’re musically impressive. That also means they’re not likely to be something buyers are looking for. In my experience, buyers tend (unfortunately) to seek out simple, minimal and familiar sounding tracks. It’s also likely they have an audience they’re trying to appeal to using the ‘lowest common denominator’ rule.
I’m not sure why you chose a volume-focused site like AudioJungle to sell your music. Investing a great deal of money and studio musicians isn’t a very good strategy for a micro-stock site. You’re much better off targeting more boutique libraries.
Hope that helps. Sorry to see you go!
Hi @versemusiclibrary ! Sorry to hear that you’re so upset, but I’m more than sure your work will find use elsewhere. I wish you the best in this vast world of the music business! It is a pity that you are leaving us, but if you decide to leave, then do not stop!
All the best! 
Hi James. While your thoughts make sense and I do agree with most of what you are saying, I too have been very perplexed by rejections some of my colleagues have gotten for tracks. I personally listened to these submitted tracks and stated “that will definitely get accepted” but then they get rejected. It seems like new authors get thrown through the grinder a bit more to “pay their dues” I suppose, but that makes no sense to me. There definitely seems to be a bias towards accepting everything from established authors who have been around here for 5 to 10 years, but rejecting the new producers submissions. @Versemusiclibrary, please link us to your submissions so we can check them out.
Funny thing.I am multi award and grammy nominated producer myself aswell.My first submissions on AJ were hard rejected.I got straight faced.
.And i listened to top selling tracks. Some of them were so childish and lack the complexity that i was used to.My entire glorious career was dumped in the garbage can.Then i understood.There was nothing wrong with the reviewers.That is the way the market works.Of course, there are other stock music libraries with different approach.AJ is ,lets say, the mainstream music of stock music libraries.Don’t get offended.Just cut 90% of your production knowledge and keep it simple.This is what clients are asking for.My 0.02.
I’m shocked. I certainly knew that sometimes tracks (good) are rejected, but not so much ((
Speaking as one of the newest arrivals, I have not found there to be any bias against new authors. I set up the account a year ago, and had 2-3 hard rejects, submitting a single track every few months to just sort of play battleship to find out where the market is at. Finally just went back to basics with some solo piano tracks and lo and behold a soft reject for silence at the beginning, and now a straight approval for the second one. No complaints from me! Now I’m just planning to add more instruments and build from very simple beginnings.
- Nathan
is it something recent that happened to you? i think if you are having that issue with rejection now is probably a good time to stay on since there has been a very sharp decrease in quality with new items since the beginning of this year, maybe from global health crisis. i tried to find post about quality level there is no answer but i am convinced that the quality has dropped a lot. many songs are too close to katy perry, puth, burno mars, other popular music it even seems risky to buyers also some nice artists that have many sales have a lot of music that are not very good i think they are getting special treatment because they are well established making review by staff seem too biased, the community at large seems professional enough and give more useful advice to authors
How can you understand the track after listening to 8 seconds, and who gives the command to lower the track to the bottom. The point of creating a group is not to support, but to destroy competitors.