I’ve definitely been looking for more vocal arrangements lately. I was sticking with strictly background music but I’ve been finding vocals really bring a mood particularly when the lyrics match the mood I’m going for.
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Just wanted to say that I really appreciate this discussion, and all the points raised in it so far 
@AndySlatter To (hopefully!) allay some of your concerns about this:
I do worry when I see the word “curated” because in a way, isn’t that the same as “boosted”?
No, they should be quite different in execution and effect. This isn’t a case of giving an arbitrary boost for search visibility - it’s more about having new ways of presenting different groups of items to customers, where it’s appropriate to do so.
@RedOctopus mentioned creators coming to the site looking for inspiration, and that’s something that we see in our customer research. Elements currently doesn’t have a lot of tools for that, outside of search results and collection pages. When we look at the category pages, we’ll be designing and building new components for that part of the site that can be used for those purposes.
For a non-Envato example, Apple’s App Store made a big shift towards this kind of thing a few years ago: moving from being a pretty standard shopfront, to having a lot of editorial-style content designed to get customers engaged and browsing when they don’t arrive with a specific product in mind.
I can’t really give advice on what to do in order to appear in those kinds of collections yet, as that work won’t start until Q1 (July). I can promise to share more information when I have it, though.
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Ben, we need official Envato Elements license verification tool. It’s total disaster when i see the scales of how much of elements items shared via pirates - usual shceme of fraud contains one account shared among other users. We lose money, Envato lose money.
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Understood, and I’ve already raised this with our Product team - let’s keep this thread on the original topic of search and item visibility though, please.
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Hey, guys, do you intend to invite more of us Junglists on Elements soon, or are we just supposed to look through the glass in these topics?
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As for items visibility and imrpoved search- better to have fresh tracks than those from guys who were on the start of Elements (nothing personal here, just objective obersvation). So every try to bring customers fresh and quality music is a top notch priority.
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It’s difficult though isn’t it? Because, if only fresh tracks were prioritised, each track would only have a small window of opportunity to gain traction/and produce earnings for the author, but also, what if that encouraged authors to produce quantity over quality because of the need to prioritise freshness? Of course, buyers can also filter tracks by “new”, but perhaps “new” could be the default state of search results? What if prioritising new tracks isn’t as effective in signing up subscribers though? Reading between the lines though, I think what you are saying is (and I agree) that it shouldn’t be that new tracks have little chance of exposure because of how the front page has been very static?
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No, they should be quite different in execution and effect. This isn’t a case of giving an arbitrary boost for search visibility - it’s more about having new ways of presenting different groups of items to customers, where it’s appropriate to do so.
Ok, thanks, sounds encouraging.
@RedOctopus mentioned creators coming to the site looking for inspiration, and that’s something that we see in our customer research. Elements currently doesn’t have a lot of tools for that, outside of search results and collection pages. When we look at the category pages, we’ll be designing and building new components for that part of the site that can be used for those purposes
Interesting, thanks.
For a non-Envato example, Apple’s App Store made a big shift towards this kind of thing a few years ago: moving from being a pretty standard shopfront, to having a lot of editorial-style content designed to get customers engaged and browsing when they don’t arrive with a specific product in mind.
That’s a good example, and one that is very visually appealing, notably, it would not be if it looked like this:
Apple
The Apple
In Apple
To Apple
Apple Inspire
Epic Apple
The Apple Upbeat
Apple to Apple
Appleness etc… 
(interestingly, a competitor site has just introduced catalogue cover images, essentially item thumbnails that represent the author’s catalogue, presumably because it will bring some visual distinction to the music search results)
I can’t really give advice on what to do in order to appear in those kinds of collections yet, as that work won’t start until Q1 (July). I can promise to share more information when I have it, though.
Ok, thanks very much for the update, Ben.
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With the glaring exception of the so-called Popular audio homepage (obviously curated, pre- and post-February 1), it’s clear that we’re still locked into constrictive one/two word titles–if we’re interested in visibility (and downloads).
@BenLeong
It’s my understanding the search engine works as it does because it needs to work across all different asset markets, and Envato never felt it necessary to tweak or develop individual protocols according to the needs of each market. So it’s naive to think after 10 years of this same discussion (as long as I’ve been with Envato) that “creative” titles will ever be accommodated.
But how about increased weight given to tags? —something we’ve also been talking about for 10 years.
It would be SO refreshing to see some search results that don’t look like the example above given by @AndySlatter.
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I would dearly love to be able to give my tracks creative titles and them still be able to be easily found, I really dislike not being able to have a unique title, and having the confusion of my title on Elements, not matching how the title is registered. Also, I just don’t think it should be allowed that there should be dozens of tracks with identical titles. I know another site that has told me I can’t use a title because it’s already been used, or there are too many very similar.
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Duplicate words is not allowed, but just «Apple to» should be ok.
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I think creative titles is the way forward.Songwriters use creative titles to their compositions
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Hi @EightBallAudio! You’re correct - until very recently, item search has been one massive system that spans all content types on Elements. That’s beginning to change, with Elements Audio items starting to use a new search system in the second half of this year.
The current site-wide system gives the highest weighting to titles, which has contributed to the current state of play: lots of tracks that have almost identical names, based around the top search keywords. “Epic Rock” shows up well for a search for “Epic” or “Rock”, which is about as blunt an instrument as you can get for search queries.
The newer system will be a lot better at handling natural language searches (“describe what you want in a sentence”), and should take a lot of the emphasis off what the track is titled. There’s also far more ability for our developers to fine-tune that system: it breaks each search query into multiple parts, and we can boost the parts that produce relevant results, while reducing the emphasis on parts that don’t.
An example of that from Photo search is our highest-volume topic: queries that include the term “background.” There are lots of photos that could be displayed: images showing lots of the background of the photo, images tagged with the word, titled with it, etc. What customers generally use that query for is finding high-resolution images with a composition suitable for use as screen wallpapers (phone, computer etc). So we adjusted that component of the search to deliver more of those kinds of results: customers started licensing more items from search, customer satisfaction went up, and they’re also significantly less likely to leave without licensing anything.
@ChoclateFix I hear you! We’re still adding more Audio authors to Elements, but that’s been a very gradual process. There have been small numbers of AJ authors invited to Elements throughout the last year, after a long pause before that.
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Yeah, this is unfair. A reviewer shouldn’t be deciding what will and will not sell, like they have a crystal ball or something.
If an item is technically good, it should be accepted, and then the market should decide whether it sells. If nobody downloads it, let it sink to the bottom of results.
We often joke in our office that items which get rejected from Elements often go on to be top sellers in our other microstock contributor accounts, which is often the case.
Just last week we had some terrific travel items rejected on Elements which are already crushing it on Adobe Stock. The only reason I can think it was rejected is a reviewer thought “nobody would need this!”
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It could be mix of both - trending and fresh.
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Exactly. @BenLeong do you know if there will be any actions encouraging authors to create and upload more vocal and rap tracks? I am 100% sure that this is the weakest link of the audio catalog both on AJ and EE. And this is the advantage of other popular stocks like Artlist etc. which makes Envato passe these days.
A few ideas to increase vocal and rap catalog:
- articles on author hub + author newsletter
- contests
- curated playlists
- easy accessible new vocal categories or tagging divided into subgenres
Worth to mention that Envato would need at least +500 visible vocal and rap tracks to become competitive in the industry. Single vocal/rap tracks usually are not universal enough to generate huge numbers of downloads (and that’s why it wasn’t a priority in Envato, right?) but as a big vocal catalog it would make a huge quality improvement. Huge.
Oh and I am not talking about inspiring motivational songs like the songs which a few top sellers were uploading years ago. We need authentic songs, indie bands, real rappers.
Without this we will continue our road to cheesy audio stock imho.
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Yeah, this is unfair. A reviewer shouldn’t be deciding what will and will not sell, like they have a crystal ball or something.
To be fair, they are not deciding what will sell, they are evaluating whether each item should be approved or rejected, based on an agreed vision in the team, about the factors to consider for each outcome. Commercial viability is one of them, a rejection on that basis doesn’t mean that the item has no value or will never sell, but that they deem it less commercially appealing, or perhaps there are already many very similar items, and this one doesn’t bring anything new.
If an item is technically good, it should be accepted, and then the market should decide whether it sells. If nobody downloads it, let it sink to the bottom of results.
Again, to be fair, that’s up to them to decide. If it was your business, do you think you’d have a policy of allowing free upload of items without quality check? Or would you want to control exactly what type of items are ingested? However, I think it’s an interesting point: if authors could upload without a review process, this would reduce the friction of the upload process and they could provide much more content, but you’d need to identify the risks of such a system, and how would you manage the risk of floods of possibly below par content?
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Yes!
Great idea, couldn’t agree more.
Several of the photographers have noticed that. Envato has rejected several of my best sellers on other sites. It also seems to depend on which reviewer you get. Last week, I submitted several different spring images of various flowers and trees blooming. All were accepted. This week, I submitted 20 new images of flowers and trees in bloom that were different from last week’s varieties and ALL were rejected. 