I have been creating music for several years, but on AudioJungle recently.
I carefully studied “Music General Acceptance and Sales Tips For Musicians by Musicians” and
listened to a lot of tracks with good sales.
I try to create high-quality tracks, but regularly receive hard reject. This is very sad.
Please tell me, what’s wrong with these tracks? What is the reason for the reject?
I will take any advice, because I really want to improve the quality of my tracks.
Thank you all for your criticism and advice.
I myself am a newbie author too and my items that I’m really proud of are getting hard rejections! So I’m not one to give you advice on how to make more suitable items for this marketplace, but I can understand what you’re going through and remind you that the review team isn’t assessing your items solely based on how beautiful and artistic it is. They’re assessing it based on how “commercially” successful this item is going to be. And as you already know, a musical piece can be very beautiful and artistically valuable and yet be a commercial failure.
So there’s no reason to get sad. You know your art is valuable, and I’ve listened to your tracks and can say they’re beautiful. The rejection only means that you need to work more on making your music more appealing to the potential buyers of this marketplace.
Your music is strongly departs from the “pattern”. It “individual” . If you listen to the music on “Aj” each track is like another. Your music is beautiful and pleasant. I’m sorry that “Envato” chose the path of monotony.
The problem is that the reviewer doesn’t indicate whether the rejection is for not being beautiful or whether it’s for not being commercially viable. There’s no lessons learned on what could’ve been done different. It just says to go to the forums for help, and the forums are filled with rejected authors asking and speculating why their submission rejected.
Sorry, just venting, I’m also a newbie and just got my 2nd rejection (out of 2 attempts). I have no idea what I could be doing different, so I’m not sure where to go from here. Frustrating.
Yeah, it’s really bad that they don’t give specific reasons for hard rejections, although the amount of submissions are so high that it can be understood why they aren’t able to give advice for everyone. I mean items are staying for more that 10 days in the review queue now, god knows how much longer it would have been if the reviewers had to give meaningful messages to all the authors.
I had 3 rejections out of 3 submissions and believe it or not, I just got the email of my 4th rejection while I was writing this reply to you! So don’t worry, your situation is not as bad!
All I can say is that becoming commercially successful in music business is VERY hard and we all knew that when we walked into this path. So we shouldn’t become disappointed this easily. We have years of studying music and practicing it in front of us before we become commercially successful.
I can’t claim to completely understand how AudioJungle works, or the pressure and time constraints of reviewers to listen to submissions all day and decide if they qualify. However, from my point of view, it would seem to behoove all of us (Audiojungle reviewers as well) if there was just a tiny bit more specifics on rejections. As of now, it seems difficult to know why a track was rejected, so there’s not much opportunity to learn and plenty of opportunity to repeat the same mistake over and over.
For example: let’s say a musician has a great beat, great melody…but the sound quality is sub par. Rejected. Musician thinks it’s the beats and melodies so he submits more tracks all with great beats and melodies, all getting rejected because of mixing/mastering. That musician may never realize this problem until someone tells them. They’ll keep submitting tracks, getting confused and frustrated at the rejections. Meanwhile, AudioJungle reviewers can’t keep up with the amount of submissions and we have a 10 day queue. I would contend that the quality of submissions would increase with the smallest amount of communication, and the number bad submissions would decrease. It would save everybody so much time and effort.
Imagine this possibility: majority of submissions are rejected. and the majority of the time, it’s for the same reason that an author’s previous submission was rejected. but the author doesn’t know that reason. So they just keep submitting tracks and not changing their approach (or changing their approach wrongly).
There’s usually a small number of fair reasons why I can imagine a track to be rejected:
musically, the reviewer doesn’t like it
the reviewer likes it, musically, but doesn’t find it commercially viable, musically.
the music is good and commercially viable, but the production quality is too low.
There was a technical mistake made in the submission process. Wrong file format. Didn’t check the correct boxes, etc… (in other words, this has nothing to do with the actual music).
I feel like it would be super quick and easy for a reviewer to decide between these 4 reasons. It would benefit the author, the reviewers, and the Envato community as a whole.
Well… There Are different predefined messages for different circumstances like the ones you mentioned. For example if the reviewer doesn’t like the item, which means he/she sees multiple weaknesses in it (case 1 & 3) you’ll get the “insufficient commercial quality” message; if the reviewer likes it but it doesn’t have commercial utility (case 2) you’ll get “insufficient commercial utility” message; if it’s case 4, you’ll get a soft rejection with a detailed message about what to change before submitting the item again. There are many other predefined message you can see here:
But I get what you mean. Getting specific advice on how to make your work better helps a lot! Don’t hesitate to ask for the community’s help, I’ve already asked for feedback for 2 of my rejected submissions and people have given me very helpful advice! And have patience. We’ll get there too!
I had 8 hard rejects for 11 items (only 3 items approved)
All track comment from reviewer - “This item does not meet the general commercial quality standard required to be accepted on AudioJungle, unfortunately.”
I want to repeat the question - what’s wrong with my tracks? (long intro? pauses? solo passages? too much repetition? too loud or too quiet?)
Tell me, please, what can I do to improve the commercial quality of tracks?
Reviewers or authors with big sales - maybe you know?
Hi LxmProduction
İ just listened your track called "AJ_Lounge"
I’ve noticed a couple of things. The guitar with tremolo effect is distractive in my opinion. That was the first thing I felt immediately. It could be quiter to prevent distraction. And maybe bring down the high frequencies a litlle bit.
Also for the arpeggio guitar in the beginng of the track, maybe lowering the volume and high frequencies would work better.
And generally, a deep sounding mix would fit better to this track. By deep i mean, "no “in your face” guitars, etc."
A smoother and a little bit reverby sound would work better
Good Luck
