Totally agree @WormwoodMusic
I’ve always thought the licencing options on AJ are really poorly thought out and implemented. It’s high time they got an upgrade. As has been mentioned, I also agree that the licence options should be built into the purchase procedure.
Here are some exemplary ways to make sure that the customer knows what they are getting and make the correct choice for their project:
- Since Envato have the rule about not mentioning competing sites by name, I’ll use abbreviations.
AN:
On the AN site, when you view your cart, you get the ‘Select a Licence’ button:
This opens a section on the page where you have to select the licence you need:
Once you’ve clicked the one you need, you can check out:
Notice the price of the digital advertising licence. Music used in digital advertising helps make companies millions of dollars in revenue. A standard web use licence should not cover this. Imagine hearing your music used in a YouTube advert for the new iPhone and realising that they paid $20 to use it!
MV:
MV also have a box that opens when you click the ‘cart’ icon on the track:
Then each licence type has further customisation options when you click them:
Once you’ve selected your options you get a summary and the cost, then you can either check out, or add to cart and carry on browsing:
I think MV offers a very fair way to price-tier licences for YouTube creators based on how many subscribers the channel has.
MB:
MB have the license selection built into the ‘add to cart’ button. When you click the cart icon, you are presented with options. Only once you’ve selected what you need does the previously greyed-out add to cart button become active:
$349 is the price for a small business to use a track in web-only promotions and videos. This, to me, is a much fairer licencing model than we have here at AJ, where the blanket term “free or commercial. Most web uses.” is applied to the cheapest licence.
Here are the other ‘Web-only’ price tiers on MB:
These are fair prices IMO.
Let me just address the ‘elephant in the checkbox’ here though… MB are offering their subscription as an alternative at this point. I DEFINITELY DO NOT THINK that Envato should do this, since it would be totally unfair to the 99% of AJ authors who are not on Elements, and the chances are, the item being added to the cart isn’t available on Elements anyway.
On a side note though, look at those subscription tier prices! If subscription stock music has to exist, this is the form it should take in my opinion. Well-thought-out pricing tiers for different end-user cases. Envato, please take note.
Broadcast Licences
Everything that I’ve mentioned so far has been about how I think various web-only usage scenarios should be licenced separately. But what about Broadcast use? In my opinion, the tier terminology used in the current broadcast licences is needlessly confusing. Using “audience size: potential reach” is a pointlessly specific and uncommon metric to use to define what licence you need to buy. I don’t think many customers understand what this term really means.
I think this can be simplified into two categories:
- TV Shows - All broadcasted TV programmes, documentaries and films
- TV Commercials - All broadcasted television commercials
Both of these should be priced at the top tier, with TV Commercials being at the very top.
Sorry for the long post, but this is a topic I feel strongly about and something I think that should be high up on the list of things to do to bring AJ back up to date and stay competitive in the industry.
I hope the pretty pictures make it less of a beast to get through!
