Has this changed been applied across all categories? Or just music? I’m assuming all categories.
If the “popular” section is now dynamically generated, then that is great news for authors and customers.
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Hi @BrandPacks! That’s correct - the change to Popular Items affects all Elements categories.
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Thanks for all this information, Ben, it is encouraging, and thanks particularly for confirming the reality of how the “popular items” ranking previously worked, it’s something I’ve asked about a few times, and you’ve now confirmed that those tracks benefitted from a manual boost. I’m glad the issue has been addressed, as that practice goes against the policy of “fair go”.
It would be good to have more transparency on this issue of “boosting”, if it is still going to be used at any level, I think we should be informed of it, because if boosting is applied manually, it means that we are at the mercy of the tastes and of the small selection of people who apply them, we should at least be aware of that, so we can decide whether we want to submit our best work to a system that might not favour us?
Also, is there any boosting involved in the “relevant” search filter? I (like many others, I’m sure) have tracks which are definitely relevant to certain search terms, but don’t appear well in search, or under “relevant”, and/or don’t seem to fair well in the “show similar” feature. Can you explain how it is decided that something is relevant, and also how it is decided what is “similar”.
Thanks Ben!
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Yep it would be nice to know if a track has been boosted because it is proving popular in recent weeks.I have had a very popular track in the past and i think that increased my sales each month.Now it is not so popular i guess that would explain my drop in revenue. Iassume the new search engine will take a little while to bed down
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Thanks Ben for the information.
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Thanks Andy & Simon! There are no manual boosts at all, for any item type - that whole system has now been replaced by the dynamic item popularity ranking.
I’m not across all the details of the current Search Relevancy calculations, but much of that would be subject to change when the new search comes in. Currently there are lots of factors involved, but (as you know!) item titles have the biggest impact on search placement.
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Hi Ben, good, I’m glad boosting has been dropped, and I would hope for a system where good tracks can easily be found, it has felt difficult to get traction with a lot of tracks, because as you’ve said, that front page was very static.
For authors, aside from concentrating on producing high quality work, and tagging and titling it in a way that will allow subscribers to find what they are looking for, do you have any ideas or advice for those who would like to create less generic “stock” sounding tracks, or more niche, culturally diverse, authentic, boutique styles of music, but are worried that such tracks will struggle to surface in the current system?
I can imagine that you might say that that’s not what customers want here, or that if those types of tracks were popular, they would be doing well already, but what if Elements is just not perceived by potential buyers as being a place to find such tracks, and we are missing a trick by not trying to be that place?
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I’d like to think there’s a place for niche music. I know for my personal projects after hearing 10 similar tracks I’d like to branch out a bit more.
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That’s good to know, KD, but do you find it easy to find them?
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To be honest, no 
Which is why I’m excited to see changes coming for search and discovery.
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Good to see Ben.Myself and Andy have a lot of worlbeat tracks in our portfolio it would be nice if they could get a look in as its tough competing with corporate tracks. I hope we have a diverse library on audiojungle
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@AndySlatter Great questions. For item popularity and customer demand, we’ll see a clearer picture for what current subscribers like over the next few months, now that there’s a dynamic system for popular items. In terms of trying to influence potential demand from future customers, that’s an interesting one to look into.
A few things on the horizon:
Elements has a big marketing push in North America coming up later this year, with a lot of customer research underway to set up for this. Once we have the research data, my team will be looking at how we can get more targeted customer information out to the author community, to help give early warning about any trends and patterns that we see.
We’re also putting together a new team to work on category-level pages for Elements (e.g. Music), tailoring these better for the people who use each item type, and introducing more curated content here. That’s likely to be a good place to expose collections of more niche content, so we can shine the spotlight onto more parts of the Elements library.
The mainstream styles are always likely to be broadly popular, so we need to make sure customers who subscribe for that content can find it easily. But there’s definitely a lot of opportunity to expand the subscriber base through the breadth of different content available, too.
It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: we need customer interest to support expansion into new areas, but we also need content in those areas for the customers to start licensing tracks. The new category curation work should mean it’s much easier to test out different niches: having more ways to showcase items/collections means we can test lots of different niches with current and prospective customers, and see what gets traction. When a style or theme gets customer traction we can promote it further, getting more customers, and bringing in more author earnings to continue fuelling the growth of that niche.
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Hi every one !
For my experience, nearly all of my tracks are in niche and it sell quite good on elements. But for now 3 or 4 months sells drop more and more and i lose about 30 to 40% of earnings … and February 2024 gonna be the worst month i ever had since i m on elements (and the same on audiojungle by the way for february and for the drop sells for month now)
Even if at the same time i continu to upload tracks … 1 per weeks usualy.
Not all of my tracks are good, original or interesting … but they used to sell more than now … it s a big source of stress for me and my little family.
Just to share … 
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Thanks for sharing, I hope things pick up for you. Your post also serves as a reminder of one of the key points of the original post: authors who rely in Elements as an income are suddenly, and without warning, experience very big drops in income.
Hopefully the changes to the system may bring in more income for us all, but in the meantime, it appears that I’m looking at a very tight month next month, and if I don’t see that improving, I’ll no longer be able to justify making content for Elements the focus of my attention. I know that doesn’t bother anyone but me, but I always thought that changes in Elements would be done in such a way as to support the people who built it.
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Thanks Ben, some interesting and positive things to look forward to there, particularly the push in North America, which does sound exciting, but I do worry when I see the word “curated” because in a way, isn’t that the same as “boosted”? If you are not lucky enough to be favoured by the people doing the curating, you’ll miss out. Currently when I look at curated collections, or blog posts about Envato’s “favourite” tracks on Elements, I feel like I’m seeing a lot of the same names. Perhaps that’s because the curators perceive those authors as being the most talented, or perhaps they’ve had the most downloads, or perhaps they have huge portfolios, perhaps the tracks appeal to the tastes of the curators, I don’t know?
What advice would you give to authors on how to make content that is more likely to be placed in a curated collection?
I have been saying that AJ / EE needs to focus on unique and niche music so many times over past years…
I hope niche genres will become profitable again. There was a time when AJ has been a trend-setter and some categories became extremely popular (corporate, cinematic, hip hop, percussive). What a pity there was stagnation in the topic of introducing new genres on AJ. After so many years AJ/EE became repetitive and it’s inspirational potential has been exhausted.
Now it’s the time to finally push it and encourage authors to create niche tracks + make it more profitable (hopefully this new system goes in that direction). I have no idea why Envato did not start to expand it’s portfolio with an authentic music like this:
- vocal songs (high quality authentic music, not inspiring stuff)
- rap
- authentic indie music
- high quality authentic folk music
and also:
- artistic instrumental/small ensemble music
- unique creative tracks
From time to time I do the music supervisor consulting and I must to say there is a very limited number of authentic high quality music on Envato (besides that, it’s hard to find it). Authentic vocal, rap, indie, band and folk music is something that makes other stocks more valuable for clients. And this is why I often have to choose these other stocks.
I am also pretty sure EE needs easy-accessible playlists/categories like e.g.
- phonk
- rumba
- 8 bit
- samba
- chineese music
etc. etc. etc.
Of course such tracks can be found by title BUT creators love to be inspired by service they use.
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I could not agree more, these are fantastic points RedOctopus, and particularly the one about Indie music, I feel like it is misunderstood, there are types of Indie music in the UK that sound very rough, basic, amateur, but it’s deliberate, and I see it used in advertising a lot, but I doubt that it would pass the review process.
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Aaaah, right, that’s a great point. I think that rewievers should be also informed about the need of passing unique tracks.
I had a few surprising rejections of my unique tracks, e.g. I made one track in the contemporary style of John Cage and it was rejected due to a lack of commercial quality. Right, John Cange style does not have a commercial quality but our stock needs artistic contemporary music e.g. for artists creating their own vlogs etc.
I made some changes in this track, made it shorter, changed category and it finally passed the review. But it’s short and less usable for clients now due to a short duration. However it made some sales, including broadcast.
Because of the potential rejections of artistic music (and because such tracks had terrible visibility), I’ve stopped uploading similar tracks.
So yep - rejections of unique tracks and upload limit which is modified by rejections counter is another issue which should be solved. I think it is a rare problem but hey - we are talking about niche music which is too rare here.
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Well, I do know that “commercial viability” is a consideration for reviewers, so it is very possible that a reviewer may personally recognise a track as being extremely well executed, but feel they have to reject it because they are instructed to only approve tracks which they believe fit into the agreed (among the review team) definition of commercially appealing.
One would guess that the reasoning for this might be:
a) If most buyers seek a specific commercial/corporate sound, the company probably want them to find that type of track most easily, and not have to wade through many tracks that are not what they are looking for.
b) Perhaps the company feels that it is not a good look, to have many tracks without sales (that only really applies to AJ of course now, as sales aren’t visible on Elements)
c) Perhaps the company feel that those niche types of music are not the speciality on Elements, or not what customers know Elements for, or not what typical Elements customers would come looking for.
However, all of that above seems more relevant to AudioJungle than Elements, niche tracks are not very visible there anyway, so it doesn’t seem like it would harm to accept them. Perhaps there could just be a way of separating them so that they don’t appear incorrectly for people seeking more commercial stuff?
We need new categories. How about (as ideas) two new categories (and sub genres):
- “Not Stock”
- “Niche genres”