Price dumping, or at what price are you willing to sell your tracks?

Envato Authors AudioJungle
1

When will the price dumping end? This is just crazy. Do you authors appreciate your time and the effort you spent? From $5 you get a pathetic $1. Are you seriously. Are you ready to sell your tracks for $1 !?!?!?!?!

Understand already, assigning a price of $5-15 will not give you profit and will not help in promoting the portfolio. You just throw your product for a pittance, like in a toilet. And at the same time, you do not allow other authors to earn money. Now is a very difficult time for musicians, especially with the sale of music by subscription, I tried and got a penny for it. It’s terrible.

I started selling on Envato in 2011 and I was comfortable selling tracks for $ 11 and the prices went up annually. And in 2019 it got worse and worse. We were given a tool for earning, given the opportunity to set a decent price for our work, but how do we use it? Many decided to take and bring down the market with pricing. Make good music and the buyer will find your track, put a decent price and the buyer will buy it anyway. But at the moment it’s just price chaos.
Maybe you should already think about it?

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It is sad indeed…

When Author Driven Prices was introduced i feared exactly for what is happening now.
To my surprise though, people actually seemed to value their work more then 19 dollars standard price and authors started increasing their prices, or keeping it at the standard price.
I raised my prices as well and it worked great for a few months.

Then elements came and cheaper authors probably scared each other that if you dont go low, you wont end up on the best sellers page, or the "tracks below 9 dollars"page.
So now there seems to be panic and everyone just starts price dumping like crazy… what a shame.

So you get to keep 1 dollar per sold track… but hey, at least you are on these important pages right?
Might as well go out in the streets and beg for change…

To these authors: In the end it is not worth it, please value your work and respect yourself.
To Envato: Consider taking away these “items under … dollar” pages, and stop rewarding people for selling cheap.

A change is needed…

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Probably when the proceeds from the sold tracks will not be enough for a pack of peanuts. :joy:

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I still don´t understand why it´s not possible for Envato to limit the price with a value of at least $15.

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Robert your message is only going to fall on deaf ears since it seems number of sales vs. revenue is all that matters. Stick to your own strategy and let those commit business suicide.

If you have a good enough product then it will find a buyer at your price.

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Thanks Graham, i should stay positive but seeing this beautiful place being teared apart by dumping, elements and neglection is hard to watch.
Yet there is nothing we can do eh? I am sticking to my own plan just like you my friend, we will keep it classy and our heads up!

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While I agree with you, Envato is actively pressuring authors to get their prices down, by creating two spotlight categories: “New under $12” and “Hot under $12”.

$5 authors are fools. But Envato plays an active role in the devaluation of our music.

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I think that envato is more focused on developing elements than our market

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While I completely agree that dumping is one way ticket to hell, however I must admit that it’s a very vague term. What if $15 tracks are the same evil that $5 ones? Should those authors be forced to put a higher price? If the mandatory minimum somehow will be set by Envato or anybody else I’d prefer it to be $39 or $49.

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It’s definitely a very grim price war going on, both from authors here but also from companies copying Elements and similar services.

Recently a very big player reduced their monthly (music only) subscription from 139 Euro a month to $16 a month, probably to match Elements and the other services in that range.

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At the same time they have raised their marketplace prices up 10 Euro. And this have happened on other marketplaces as well, once they introduce subscription their normal marketplace normal went up. Maybe this is a way of communicating to different buyer segments? Or maybe it is to make their sub model look even more tempting?

Whatever is happening here at AJ it does not seem to be working for driving more traffic to the market, thats for sure. If $5 were such a great business we would see 500-1000 + weekly sales on the popular pages of these tracks, which we do not.

So every author needs to ask themselves is it really worth gaming the system for instant gratification if you have to destroy the market and make yourself unemployed here in a couple of years? In the end we are all numbers to the Envato HQ, if we don’t value our products here, they will for sure not. And we will scare away those customers who get turned off by all the cheap tracks, those customers who might save our future.

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With prices like now, our future will burst like a soap bubble. :rofl:

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It’s no mystery that the search engine is driven by algorithms. If a new release comes on the market at $5 and starts to sell, the algorithm will present the track more and more. Even older releases can gain traction. All of the popular files authors focus their entire business on ensuring that item hits 22 units sold at all costs. If they are feeling unsure about achieving 20 to 25 units sold, they will dump the price to attract as many quick sales as they can to stay there. The algorithm probably is favoring lower priced tracks because Envato could care less, they always get their seller fee and buyer fee. I am not sure Envato has any incentive to have a floor in at $15. Would that increase their revenue?

Would it help bring stability to the market long term for music producers if the minimum was $15? Probably. Authors would price their tracks at $0.0000000000000001 cents if they could just to get those 20 sales, and ultimately achieve popular files advertising space for their brand.

A toxic atmosphere has been created with the $5 minimum because clearly everyone is in a race to try and get those 21 sales so you get a week of brand exposure on popular files which essentially amounts to prime advertising space for your brand. Clearly, the strategy works.

I actually think Envato would applaud if every music producer on the market dropped their price to $5.

Even if a music producer does not land on popular files, the extra units sold does add “algorithmic favor” to that item for sale.

I think Producers launch tracks for $5 to try and “jump start” them, then they raise the price.

Also some real and practical advice to all: The changes happening in this business are very serious and there is no reason to fight a sinking ship, so if your revenue is drastically declining and you really depend on music licensing income to support your family or even just yourself, I would look for other work. Writing music and selling it on line is no longer a growth business. Competition is greater than ever and will only get more challenging. Just remember that you are not entitled to a fair wage just because you know how to write a piece of music. Capitalism is not set up to be “fair”. It’s an economic system where Kings do everything they can to exploit free labor to maximize profits for themselves with 0 concern for the labor force.

Watch this movie. The same principles apply to our industry. Netflix too is on a mission to exploit and use music producers. They don’t care about your well being. They just want your music for as little as possible.

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Mostly I agree with you. But unfortunately, I do not agree to give my work for $1. I understand this is a business and nothing more. Any marketplace spits on its authors. Envato is no exception. I’m only talking about the fact that the authors were given a tool for earning and many do not understand what to do with it. I don’t think that lower prices will help them somehow. I have been watching many authors with low prices for a long time and noticed, as soon as they raise the price, sales stop. )))

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I am pretty sure their revenue and our revenue would increase without any loss of traffic at all. But they simply do not want to, maybe because they desperately want to reach more zero budget customers that can resonate with subscription. If so I just do not see that it is working based on sales number on AJ. The best measurement for this might be featured files which do not really impress that much with sales numbers either anymore.

Yes you are right, this is what is happening. This is probably also quite annoying from a customers perspective. Either way those sales figures we see on the last months best sellers are not impressive https://audiojungle.net/category/music?date=this-month&sort=sales&utf8=âś“&view=list#content But they surely bring the average track price way down and that is extremely unnecessary.

I know its wishful thinking to expect that music producers will think more long term, but I do think we can influence or reduce the destruction of the market by taking some responsibility and not joining this madness. Some people even sell great niche tracks at $5 (!)

Across the pond, traffic is surprisingly slowly increasing overall lately. They have $15 minimum for music. But yes we can only dream of that here. I think AJ is to small in the Envato ecosystem for Envato HQ to take any actions at this, after all the problem is not so big on their main sites. So we are left to ourselves I guess. Which is a creepy thought :slight_smile:

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As one of my friends said about such sites as Envato, etc. To sell well, you need 10% professionalism and 90% luck. :rofl: And he is right.

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:clap:

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It’s a lot easier to sell 20 to 25 units at $5 to get the advertising and promotion of the brand on “Popular Files”. Envato’s terms of service is set up to incentivize that behavior.

If they were to reward revenue generated and not units sold, the face of popular files would change. Imagine if the PF page changed to “Last Weeks Top Earning Tracks”. That Playlist would be far more interesting because it would consist of tracks that sold the tier 5 license - Broadcast and Film - often $500 to $1000 for just one unit sold.

How is it impressive when an author sells 25 units at $5 earning not even $20 for themselves? People earning less than $20 are getting rewarded with prime advertising space?

You guys love to experiment, why not create a new category "“Last Weeks Top Earning Tracks”

That presentation would consist of mostly tracks that sold $500 to $1000 Broadcast and Film Licenses and could be a page that would appeal to customers on the higher end.

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Envato’s approach is centered on incentivizing author behavior that makes music available to customers for less money. The primary metric they value is price.

I think ADP was introduced by Envato for the same reason as Elements. They are customer-focused, not author focused, and they wanted to enable authors to reduce their prices below the old minimums that existed.

They had a pretty good idea there was an ample supply of authors who would virtually give their music away if given the opportunity to adjust their price drastically downward in a desperate attempt to move into popular files territory.

Envato makes their guaranteed minimum fee per sale, and their customers get music for next to nothing. Everybody wins, except… hmmm, I think I’m leaving a group out here…

ADP and Elements are intended to lower the overall cost of music for customers. Envato is focused on growth and increasing their customer base, intending to increase revenue by increasing the volume of units sold.

On the subject of adjusting the search algorithm to prioritize revenue generated over units sold, well, that would be a system that is author-centric, not customer-centric. I maintain, as I said above, that their primary metric is price. Low is good, high is bad.

Author A who sells a bunch of units at $5 might yield less revenue than Author B who sells a few broadcast licenses at $250, but Envato would rather focus the attention on the track that sold a bunch at $5 because they view this as more appealing to customers.

Sure, you can debate the validity of that approach, and we all have until our fingers cramp up from furiously writing posts in these forums, but the company’s actions speak volumes about where their priorities are. And I’ll tell you where they absolutely aren’t: on the well being of creative professionals who produce the music sold here.

As prices trend dramatically down, and as Envato actively promotes “tracks under…” and subscriptions, marketplace authors are facing very difficult times ahead.

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This is unfortunately very true.

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I agree with you! Fully support!

1 Like