Hello there! Some grumpy remarks from a new author

Well, I’ve been here for like two weeks, and already had 2 sales. While in general it might not sound particularly impressive, I’m quite pleased with it considering all the competition and the fact that I’m a new author with a small library of 10 one-second foley sound items.

In fact it’s quite self-assuring to have somebody buy what I did. My little foley-voiceover-music studio actually DOES what it was supposed to do. Wow. In your face, all you “aren’t you wasting your money” and “don’t quit your daily job yet” guys.

The site design is really great, all the friendly support from the reviewers is remarkable. One thing I’m a little bit concerned about, though, is the future of AudioJungle. There is already a huge library of music, sound, idents etc., so the competition is growing. I’m worried that in a few years time there might be like millions of sounds. Is it good? Well, no.

It will provide a broader choice for the buyers, yes, but also it will be getting more and more difficult to find anything really good, interesting, ORIGINAL and suiting needs (unfortunately, you can’t really precisely describe audio with keywords, can you).

For authors, it will be very difficult to sell anything. The overall sales might still amount to thousands of files/week but it will be distributed among a huge amount of authors, each of them earning 5$ and that’s it.

I don’t really have any suggestions on how to solve this problem. Or is it a problem?

Anyway, AJ is what I’ve been looking for. Hi all!

Hey Locke,

That actually wasn’t too grumpy .

Without knowing really anything about AJ plans besides what Scott has hinted at regarding focusing on quality over quantity, my take on this is that AJ will definitely grow but it will be much more positive than the monster you’re describing. One reason is that AJ already has in place some pretty strict quality standards, whereas some of the really big sites with 100s of thousands of clips seem to accept just about anything in the name of being a huge library. Given my experience so far, I don’t think that the goal for AJ will ever be to make things cumbersome for buyers or unappealing to sellers.

Since I’ve been here (about 14 months) the amount of audio has increased greatly but it appears so have the sales. I’ll repeat here what many others have said on similar threads – just keep posting quality work, tag your work appropriately, and do what you can to promote yourself. The sales will come.

Good luck, and welcome aboard!

—Joel

Hey Locke,

Great to have you on AudioJungle, thanks for the feedback! When I saw “Grumpy” in the title I thought, “Uh-oh!”, but when I read your post it wasn’t grumpy at all, very constructive and good questions.

I think I need to create a FAQ page because these questions come up a lot so I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but basically, think about iTunes. Do recording artists complain that there are too many tracks in iTunes already? Nope. Do Apple keep accepting new submissions every day? Yup. Do individual artists keep selling tens of thousands of tracks each day despite there being a gazillion other tracks in iTunes? Yup!

AudioJungle is kinda the same way. We are a marketplace – a vehicle for you to sell YOUR music. You can promote and market YOUR music as much as you want, get your customers to come to AudioJungle to purchase your stock audio. The additional benefit of AudioJungle is that we have a huge following – already over 500,000 members. That’s a pretty amazing audience. So not only can you direct potential new clients and customers to your work on AudioJungle, but we have a huge audience visiting us on a regular basis already that are already exposed to your music through our features, collections, advertising, contests, blog, podcast, newsletters, Twitter, Facebook and other rich and varied promotional pieces we have in place to tell the world about YOUR music on AudioJungle.

We also have a much-improved search system that we will be working on next year which will further help customers find the perfect audio for their project.

So does more authors + more music mean more competition? Of course! But does it mean you will no longer make money? Not necessarily. Being successful at producing and selling stock music is about dedicating yourself to a marathon, not a sprint. This is a 26 mile race that involves commitment and endurance. The more you “run”, the further you will go.

My advice to anyone on AudioJungle, particularly new authors, is to maintain your already high standards of music production and composition, upload regularly, market and promote yourseld OUTSIDE of the Envato network, immerse yourself INTERNALLY within the Envato network, establish short-term goals (# sales, getting on the Popular Files page/chart, acquire more/new badges etc…) and just see how far you can go. I tend to think personally that you get out of life what you put into it.

Ultimately, and I can say this from experience as an author not just because I work here, AudioJungle is an opportunity. When opportunities present themselves, some people take them and run with them and some people let them pass by. My advice is to always embrace opportunity, live it and breathe it, and see how far you can go with it.

Good luck. Or should I say, “Good Locke”?!

scottwills said
Good luck. Or should I say, “Good Locke”?!

Wow that’s bad….!

garethcoker said

scottwills said
Good luck. Or should I say, “Good Locke”?!

Wow that’s bad….!

Don’t get me started on you, Coker-Cola.

And I’ve never heard that one before

scottwills said

garethcoker said

scottwills said
Good luck. Or should I say, “Good Locke”?!

Wow that’s bad….!

Don’t get me started on you, Coker-Cola.

Two in a row Scott? C’mon

lol at coker cola haha, you guys make me laugh you’ll be biting each others heads of soon loooll

abir187 said
lol at coker cola haha, you guys make me laugh you’ll be biting each others heads of soon loooll

Chill out, man. Someone obviously needs “a beer”.

Abir = a beer?

Oh forget it. I should have quit after the first pun, right?

That one was actually pretty good.