To be or not to be exclusive with AJ?

I signed up as exclusive but now I am wondering if it would be a better strategy to be non-exclusive, so I can have income streams from other libraries with the same music.

I liked to idea of just using AJ to save time uploading and keeping track of sales across many different libraries…but I also have to think of this as a business and do whatever I can to increase revenue.

What is your experience with exclusive vs. nonexclusive?
What is good about it and what is the flip side?
Are there other benefits to an exclusive deal on the AJ platform, than the percentage you make on sales?

1 Like

An interesting article: http://www.frontiersoundfx.com/exclusive-vs-non-exclusive-finally-answered/

2 Likes

Hi, I am the exclusive author, those tracks that don’t approve on an audiojungle - I spread on other audiodrains for sales as not the exclusive author. :sunny: :wink:

Cool FIFJungle. Sounds like it is working for you in terms of sales?

OvertSounds - Yes that is a really interesting article. Like what he says about the option of being non-exclusive with AJ first and then changing to exclusive later if it makes sense.

Too everyone, is this possible to do with AJ - start out as non-exclusive and then switch later? Or is there anything I need to be aware of here?

After switching to non-exclusive you have to wait 1 month when changes apply.

I am non-exclusive and for me it has been the best choice business wise. The final difference between the royalties is only double, which means that even after you have already sold a lot of music through AJ, each licence is only 2 times more valuable than the non-exclusive licence. For me it would mean that my current total sales for two years would be close to 5000 in value instead of my current 2500. While you’d think that 2500 extra sales would be a no brainer, I have not found it to be so. The reasons are as follow:

  • on AJ you don’t set the price yourself and AJ prices are really really low. On a marketplace where you can set the licence price yourself, I’ve found that for example a base price between 30-35 dollars gives you still really good sales. Hence if you manage to get reasonable volume on a market where you get 15-17 dollars for each licence sold, you are already beating the exclusive AJ as a non-exclusive seller. You can imagine the smile on my face when I see 5 licences sold for 30-35 dollars instead of 5 licences sold on AJ from which I only get 25 dollars in total.

  • as a non-exclusive you multiply the chance for a sale for each of your items, not only the items you don’t get on AJ. My portfolio is currently almost 600 tunes on AJ and my total portfolio is close to 1000 items. I can get possible sales for each 1000 of them which means A LOT, in comparison to only 300 items that I’d have outside AJ if I were exclusive.

For me the outcome is such that if I were exclusive on AJ my total income from music would be a small percentage of my current total yearly sales.

Of course this all depends. Is your portfolio big enough and quality high enough to get good sales from many marketplaces. Impossible to tell before you try and see.

Only thing I’ve wondered every once in a while is that does the non-exclusive status affect some hidden logic in the engine itself - I’ve never had any of my tunes as a featured and trending item has also been really really rare occasion. It feels a bit weird as my total sales are quite good in AJ standards and many exclusive portfolios with smaller volumes have had both. If being non-exclusive makes it harder to get those high sought after bonuses, it might affect the decision, but still - even if being exclusive would give you featured item and 1000 extra sales, it still wouldn’t make it better than getting extra income from many places.

1 Like

I’ve initially signed up exclusive. But there’s an option to change after a month. So if nothing happens I may switch to non exclusive and try other libraries too.

To be or not to be exclusive… For each author, this is a different thing. For you, exclusivity can be good, but for another author NO! This is a combination of many factors. Genre, quality, volume of portfolio, popularity, your creativity, etc.
So you must to find alone the Good option for yourself. Of course this can not happen fast!
But you can make variations of your music that are not sold in envato and sell in another market. This is also an opportunity!
Once thieves can sell here processed works, why you to can’t doing versions of your songs !?

1 Like