i know what is like to work in the industry. i am a professional musician from 20 years, i know that very well.
i joined AJ to put some extra money on the table, uploading items in my free time.
i see that even this is -maybe- not worth it, i am not pretending you agree with me, i am describing my point of view.
everyone makes choices, and i am checking AJ in these terms,
no need to tell that hard work pays, we know that already.
Ps- 9,50 $ at the best is obviously referred to the ONE item net authorâs gain.
Yes, and the $150,000 also referred to one itemâs net gain. This is a mass sales market, and you need to look at each itemâs value over 5-10 years.
Being a professional musician for 20 years doesnât mean youâre a better producer or writer of production music than a 19-year-old with zero years as a professional musician. Itâs a different world.
wowâŚi think we are in full misunderstanding here my friend.
You still donât get my point. i AM NOT SAYING Iâm better than ANYONEâŚi am saying that i know the rules, and that i can ONLY CHECK IF AJ IS GOOD FOR ME, FOR MY NEEDS. if you read that i m telling Iâm better than other, you are completely wrong.
Does it make sense to you?
Well, you say âweâ which is interpreted as âeveryone hereâ. Maybe translation error. For YOU, it might not be worth it. Thatâs perfectly fine! For me, itâs definitely worth it, and for many others too. But you canât really tell after just 7-8 months with very few items. 70+ items and a few years and then you start to know what works and what doesnât. Best of luck!
Well OF COURSE i am talking for me only, why should i talk for everyone hereâŚwho am i to say that??
I really started uploading in sept 2016, but not continuously because itâs extra work for me, january and december i was off on AJ so i have the items i had time to compose. and i know i have few items because of thatâŚand that sales depends also on how big your portfolio is.
If you allow me, i was having a thought on how things are processing.
thatâs why we have a forum here, to put thoughts into it. isnât it?
Good luck to you too, see whats gonna happen then, i am not here to fight anyone, just thinking out loud.
A search engine doesnât grab your hand or put a gun to your head and force you to type in a ridiculous name as your song title.
When you have an author behavior that causes a problem, you can fix the issue by either not rewarding the behavior or not allowing it. Authors are creating these silly titles on their own and to end this problem, Envato needs to take control and consider these options because we all know authors will continue to play this game:
Remove the title from the basic search algorithm entirely, which makes it meaningless, and create a separate title search for those who want to find a specific title. This would stop rewarding the behavior and cover all existing music titles without requiring anyone to change existing titles.
Stop allowing authors to use obvious keyword combinations as titles and soft reject the songs that do until a different title is created. This would no longer allow the behavior from this point forward.
Blaming the search engine for human behavior doesnât make any more sense than blaming your gun for shooting and killing your neighbor when youâre the one who committed the murder. Constantly going back and forth with questioning the search engine algorithm and second guessing its development is an expensive waste of time when all you have to do is tell the authors to stop or their submissions with be rejected.
So you would say the root cause is the uncontrollable urge to use keyword titles? And the search engine doesnât make it happen. Sure. Of course the underlying cause is the way the search engine works. Youâre contradicting yourself.
The gun analogy is beyond irrelevant. Better would be to have a roulette wheel that stops on black 95% of the time. Do you think that would cause players to always bet on black even though their favorite color is red? You bet it would.
OK, last time Iâm answering your trolling before I block you. It is not a search engine problem. The search engine is not creating the titles, the authors are. The only reason for suggesting removal of the title from the algorithm is the author behavior. If youâre using âlogicâ, start from the root cause.
I might be wrong,but I think this is the buisness philosophy pyramid of Envato:
1)Customers are the most important people in whole Marketplace
2)Envatoâs main goal is to create more income to their wallet
3)Authors here are get respect,but their comfort will be always on second place because Look #1 and #2
This all leads to conclusion that if this search is more comfortable for customers and brings more buyers and sales to whole marketplace than it should be kept and authors should adapt to this system if they want to make money.
Iâm afraid that if author will begin to call AC\DC type of a track not a Hard Rock,but like âWhore is Dancing On My Roofâ ))
Or âTrain Breaks The Wallâ )))
Or insted of Epic Dubstep they will call track something like âGrowl Party meet Angelsâ or âBe Open to New Worldâ.
This will definetly look more creative and less boring for authors,but as for client who is very busy and has only 5-20 minutes to find a right track this artistic names will bring more problems rather then goods.
My personal opinion is too much weight to sales, top tracks gets too much momentum. There is almost no chance to sell your corporate on uplifting track. Itâs appears in search engine on 2nd page on first day of approval, and gets to 3rd and 4th pages after few days.
Too much disrespect for new tracks. (By search engine settings of course)
Itâs normal that when people upload new track, they looking for some ways get it sold.
And Authors with 5000 sales tracks, adding few âname-words-keywordsâ, because they benefit from this. Itâs clearly. Donât even tell me.
And then search engine looks bad. Itâs competition, business.
Corporate just as Epic Category are completely different worlds
Just look at the statistics.
There 2192 tracks added last month in Corporate category
and 1620 in Cinematic.
Thereâs not much to do to always appear on the first page in search.
You go down in search not because the engine works that way,but because there are too many new tracks.
ahahah last âcorporateâ track i uploadedâŚafter 2 hours i was in page 6âŚnot bad
At the endâŚi think Envato doesnât care about this issueâŚtheir mission is money, so of course they push top sellers cause they guarantee income, and of course they let us upload tons of stuff no matter if names and music are similar or soâŚthey will gain money here and there anyway, soâŚi donât think itâs gonna change here, unless the AJ thing implodes on itself
just my thought, donât fight it, otherwise have a healthy discussion here.
Hard, but hardly inappropriate to give it a try. To ease on the âview gamingâ one could introduce a âgrace periodâ of a month or so where this mechanism is delayed. Alternatively, forget the exposure points and simply time-limit premium exposure with a linear âease-outâ function starting at a set point (for example after 1 month and 200 sales). The point is to encourage NEW GOOD tracks to enter the market. No track is so unique or fantastic that it should be able to block out all new competition from thousands of authors for YEARS.
Being forced to use generic names is âsadâ, but not âunfairâ. What is âunfairâ, is that best sellers KEEP GETTING TOP LEVEL EXPOSURE MONTH AFTER MONTH. Balancing out the âwinner takes allâ mechanism would create a much more stimulating battlefield. Iâd rather see a system where a âstellarâ track enjoys all the benefits of exposure for, say, a couple of months, and then âlostâ its position of being âuntouchableâ in the search. Much like if its sales count dropped to zero, it would compete on a level playing field with new tracks once again.
I would guess that on the Envato side, since conversions keep happening in the current state of affairs, every change would be deemed risky. I also would think they have done some experimenting/research in the past and concluded that new tracks donât convert as well as big sellers. While this is all making sense from a business perspective, itâs taking the breath out of authors like me who every morning wake up needing to decide if I will work 1 day or 1 week at a track. I commonly choose 1 day, because throwing a weekâs work into the cesspool is too risky for me with the current system in place. If there was a reasonable window where a new corporate track could get âmomentum exposureâ, Iâd be happy to deliver much more polished and thought-through tracks.
This problem ties in to the fact that too many corporate tracks are being approved. The bar should ideally be at the point where reviewers feel âthis track is better than what we currently have in Popular Filesâ, not as it is now where any âdecentâ track slips through.
Summary;
raise bar
time-limit (or sales-limit) premium exposure
enjoy a wider range of high quality submissions while keeping conversion rate
Yes!!! Definitely! I sometimes think the reviewers are harsher on other genres than they are on corporate tracks; I see people post on the forums asking why their track was rejected, and sometimes itâs a rock or a piano track which is actually quite good. But then you look through AJ and see some corporate tracks (even sometimes FEATURED ITEMS!!) which are utter RUBBISH. But in my opinion the opposite should be happening; the acceptance criteria for corporate music should be much tougher than for any other genre, itâs not like the buyers are going to think there are not enough tracks around already.
Also, I would LOVE it if Envato took it up on themselves to delete older tracks at their own discretion, for example if they find something that is just crap and would never have been approved by modern standards, they should just go and delete it, after all they own the marketplace.
I actually think that reviewers judge all tracks based on a very simple answer to the question : âWill someone license this track for a project?â if the answer is yes, they probably will approve it. Of course everyone has chased or will try to chase the corporate genre. I actually am starting to think that the strategy will work against authors moving forward. It also seems like search for single keywords âcorporate, inspiration, or upbeatâ are set up to present only top sellers and immediately convert the search to a sale. Itâs as if envato is saying âthese are the best sellers, itâs proven, people listen to them and immediately click buy, do not waste your time searching for a corporate track, we have it right here, just buy now.â That IS literally what is happening in this market. If that is working and driving revenue, why would they change it? So yes, those authors at the top are going to enjoy big earnings for a long time.
The only way to spread the wealth around a bit more is by developing curated playlists in each genre. Maybe customers would browse curated playlists of jazz, blues, folk, funk, hard rock, world, etc.They wonât listen unless it is presented to them the way popular files are presented. I donât knowâŚitâs all my opinion, but itâs very clear that it is a lot more challenging to sell new releases and gain traction beyond the 1 or 2 token sales in the first week or so. I also remember Envato saying they will regularly tweak the search algorithm so no one can take advantage of the âformulaâ. Well, all top sellers have figured out the âsecretâ and they have changed their titles to âupbeat inspired uplifting corporate indieââŚetcâŚensuring that their track is on page one, ensuring sales. Once again, new releases do not have a chance other than getting that 2 hour lucky window of front page coverage on Monday though Wed at 10AM in the states and 4PM in in EuropeâŚHow often does anyone get that release slot? Weâve gone full circle on this issue again. New releases again, get little priority when customers perform âsingle keywordâ search.
I dunno, this whole political system could boil down to one question, would you as someone who is experienced in your given frame of art, take the time to listen to something that looks like everything else, given from a title perspective?
What do you mean by âpolitical systemâ? When you behave as a buyer you perform a search and then you listen to the playlist delivered. How long a buyer browses depends on how much time they have. If you want a corporate inspirational upbeat track you will search those keywords listen to to 15 or 20 and make a decision. Envato has made the decision to put the proven sellers out front. Best Selling authors have changed their titles so they ensure that those appear on page 1 of search results whenever any of those single keywords are searched. They also live on popular items. Yes, winner takes all in this market. New items only morph into strong sales if you have 1000 followers, many whom are clients, and you are a long time author with a reputation here.
For me, itâs definitely worth it, and for many others too. But you canât really tell after just 7-8 months with very few items. 70+ items and a few years and then you start to know what works and what doesnât. Best of luck!