I’ve been licensing my music on audiojungle for over 10 years. When I first started, the audiojungle community was really fun and exciting. Tracking sales, getting badges, watching my monthly and yearly sales continue to climb, partnering with members of videohive, everything was pointing towards a long lasting future here. At my peak I was about to crack into the top 100 authors, I believe i was ranked 102 at my peak, then came Envato Elements and everything came crashing down. Fast forward to today and my sales are now 5-10% of what they were at their peak. It’s easy to see that this trend is sitewide by simply looking at top selling items. In the past you’d have a number of items that had over 100 monthly sales, today top sellers are usually around 30 monthly with a majority priced at $5.
As my sales decline I had to slow my production for AJ. At the beginning of this year I posted my last audio logo to AJ and it became my first new track uploaded that got 0 sales. I could see my time uploading to AJ was done. I work full time in music and have plenty of work in other arenas but there was a time I considered putting most of my efforts into AJ and make it my primary source of income.
I’m curious of others experience here especially those that have been around before the envato elements era and what you’ve done to combat this sales decline. I’ve considered moving my account to non exclusive and finding multiple sites to sell on but it hurts a bit since for years I worked so hard to get to the highest earning percentage. I’m not sure that’s worth the effort but it would be great to hear from others on their experiences.
Yes, brother, I started posting tracks this year, but after reading the forum I already had an idea that everything died with the appearance of Elements. And not selling my tracks is proof of that.
I have recently posted on the forum, Sales Monitor, my frustration on how sales have declined within the past 2 - 3 years, pretty much the advent of Elements. How I have come to the anger of how AudioJungle has changed adversely for authors but also how authors have brought about it’s downfall with $5 tracks. I indeed stooped to this behaviour but selling a handful of these items at this price I reverted back to a reasonable price tag.
With the copycat tracks and lack of invention, it is us authors ourselves that have assisted in the decline of the market. Elements has brought about a fractured community, those who contribute and feed this monster and those who are at the mercy of a changing or changed market. I am dismayed with the forum constantly seeking appraisal of the authors seeking feedback for rejected tracks and sometimes not accepting hard rejection. Reasoning for track rejection is obvious as some authors cannot “hear” what is “wrong” with these tracks as they do not understand what this market requires. We also have authors who copy existing tracks becuase they are featured on the weekly best sellers without understanding how musically they stand out. Envato has continually accepted these tracks and the market has stagnated as genres of music become oversaturated with these items. Creativity and originality has been eroded from a once healthy and bouyant market. Some authors reading this will be sick of the moaning and lamenting of how things were but Audiojungle did in fact use to be a better place and there was a vibrant community but now…non-existent.
Going non-exclusive and starting over again is not really an option I want to do and losing out on a silly commission rate that was once at an elite author level is a non-starter. If authors want to complain about declining sales then author behaviour such as price dumping, submission of boring tracks and contributing to a subscription model then they have themselves to blame. These subscription models everywhere have been instrumental in the decline of the prosperity of authors.
Don’t you think that these last 3 years, the appearance of many platforms and the consolidation of some of them is also the cause? Most work with a subscription, with very low prices and for some, refuse authors affiliated with a PRO? Add to that the Sunday musicians who tinker with samples on ableton and who don’t give a damn about making money, as long as their music is broadcast?
Subscription models have destroyed authors full stop. Sync licensing is dead and offering broadcast licensing especially for mass reproduction and film/tv licenses will be hit as broadcasters will look to tracks offered on subsciption sites to serve them. Without a proper paper trail who knows if a track has the correct license especially for broadcast. I am not a contributor to Elements but it seems that there is no way to monitor or police downloads apart from PRO affiliation who can track such usage if cue sheets are indeed filled in correctly and also Content ID.
I’ve been here since mid-2016. And throughout 2017, I was progressing to the up. Sales were growing. Increased by a large, but still income. But with the discovery of Elements and the assignment of prices by the author. And, accordingly, price dumping… The depreciation of our time. It became very, very. VERY bad! And now they also don’t give away what they honestly earned! Therefore, I transferred to non-exclusive and went to other drains. At least they pay there… Here they only arrange questions that lead to nothing.
I still shake my head at $5 dollar pricepoints. Authors make pennies on that…why do they continue to do that? Having a long history here I was able to see like the year and time this decline began and you are right audiomania it was the combo of less customers when envato elements started and then even further less sales with author set pricing making it so difficult to make sales on anything priced higher than $5.
It’s matter how you position yourself on this market. I do not want to be in this 5 dollars garbage, because me and my customers value my music. So someone decided to be “cheap” and i’m more on “price-perfomance” side.
I remember before Elements we had the search algorithm experiments which also affected the sales dramatically. I had some months earning like a really lot before that, then the search algorithm made me like 1/4 of the sales and then came elements… 1/7 of sales… I was also hoping to a bright future but unfortunately it didn’t happen… and I am not sure and I am not motivated now at all to write more
As a relative newcomer here, it is dismaying to see these types of posts, and there are more and more of them. My guess is that Elements is the main reason for the lack of sales. Doing a sub and then being able to download anything and everything, suits most users fine. There will always be those who seek quality, and will pay for it, but most don’t really care too much. Given the choice, they will take unlimited for the price of 1, even with the lower quality. It would be nice if AJ would set a minimum price so that the marketplace would stay at least at a higher level and allow the lower quality stuff to filter to Elements.
What lower quality are you talking about? They’re the same tracks. Elements has a smaller library but the quality is the same as on AJ, or even better on average, as the legion of subpar tracks have not made the cut.
@PurpleFog I stand corrected then. I didn’t realize they had an overlap. Even more a reason for people to just join Elements. I guess my comment at the end is more pertinent, that AJ should be the higher quality stuff, and Elements should be more for generic cookie cutter stuff. It will be difficult to justify spending more than 30 minutes on a track if it only makes pennies on each download.
Elements contributors were initially invited and then via application. It now seems that Elements has now closed it’s doors for the masses and thousands of authors are not part of this subscription model are subjected to these vulgar banners that have dominated the marketplace. All new traffic are subjected to this aggressive Elements promotion which is really bad taste. Authors who have been loyal and played by Envato’s terms and conditions have been kicked to the kerbside. Now we are at the mercy of Envato who dictates how the market behaves. It seems that September has been the announcement of the grand plan to destroy the sync market once and for all.
Let down and really angry,.
It makes me frustrated and angry that Envato have abandoned the loyal authors that make their business possible. But It’s naive to believe that any corporation as large as they are can really maintain a true community foundation since the bottom line is always going to be how many $s go into the share holder’s pockets. Only when the dissent of their author community starts to affect that bottom line will they begin to patch any of the gaping holes in their moral fabric that have been highlighted by many of us here in the forums 'til we’ve gone passed being blue-in-the-face and just buggered off entirely.
Envato gives us no reason to be loyal these days. Did anyone ever see that god-awful '80s movie with Rowdy Roddy Piper called ‘They Live’? If we had a pair of those sunglasses, that Elements banner would say “Lump it you bunch of fools. We’re gonna just keep spamming your items because we know that we’ll never have any shortage of suppliers. We actually closed the door to new authors because the queue to join is so long. If you don’t like it we’ll open the door so you can leave and let your replacements march right on in.”
Portfolios are valuable assets representing, in some cases, thousands of hours of work. They deserve better than this ghost town for a home!