There are plenty of these subscription based music licensing services today. And yes, we can argue and complain that the value of music is diminishing. But let’s leave that aside for now.
Does anyone in here have your music on Soundstripe, or any similar service? I want to hear your thoughts, and what your experience is with them.
I haven’t really heard from many composers who are part of a subscription service. The only one I did hear from said he made pretty much nothing from it.
They mostly seem to be after ‘artist’ music though as opposed to production music from composers.
Personally I don’t like the model and I’ve seen one offering lifetime access to their catalogue for about $200 and the prices of the rest of them are dirt cheap, I don’t see how its sustainable. It will likely make some money for the owners of the library though. They can just get lots of sign-ups up for a few years and then cut and run.
The pricing will attract lots of filmmakers and videographers though, $12.50 a month for unlimited licenses is insane, I mean Spotify is only slightly less a month and that’s a listening platform.\
Its never cheap enough though, I get bombarded with ads from these services on my FB and Instagram and the comments are full of people asking if they do sales.
I don’t like that the market pushes the pricing lower every year, but is it not simply a fact of life. Supply and demand.
I guess I was hoping to hear a success story from a fellow composer, even a small one. But it might as you say that only the publisher benefits really.
I have been avoiding subscription based libraries since the money is so bad, if you do the math, it’s just impossible to make good money. Someone pays 30 dollars a month and gets to download unlimited amount of tracks. 50% of it goes to the site owner, and the remaining 15 dollars is divided between all the downloads, if they downloaded your song and 14 other songs from other artists, you get $1. If they download your whole catalogue of 100 songs, but also 15 other people’s catalogues that are the same size, you might still get only $1 in total. Some sites have bonuses on top of that but they’re not much. Even if they download only one song, the creator gets $15, which might be less than from any fixed price site.
However a few days ago I gave in and uploaded my first five songs to Motion Array. I Think as long as the subscription service doesn’t snag customers away from your fixed price sales, it’s fine, but for example in the case of AudioJungle, there has been a banner to Envato Elements at the top of the page for as long as I can remember, snagging people from the market to the subscription service, so I’ll probably never put my songs into Envato Elements, since it’s eating the profits from the market. I think it’s less likely for the customers to move if the subscription site has no connection to the market site. I haven’t yet heard a real success story from anyone who is using subscription based sites, only over optimistic excuses (This month I got $3.27, but I just started, It will get better believe me!), but it is still extra income as long as your market sales are doing ok.
From the customer’s point of view this is an almost free buffet, I understand why it’s so tempting, I almost subscribed to Envato Elements myself to get cheap video material for my stock music videos.
Oh, and for songs that just don’t make any sales with fixed prices, it might be a good idea to put them on a subscription site, there’s nothing to lose.
Thanks for sharing your experience Joonas, how many tracks do you have on Motion Array now?
And yes, for customers this is so much value. But for us composers it’s just a sad part of how the market is moving (towards subscription services).
I only have four songs live and one in the queue since me giving in to subscription was a recent event. No downloads yet. @eero also has a handful of songs there and he has made some money already. It seems like an active site.
Motion Array is my first adventure into the realm of subscription-based libraries.
As far as I can tell, each download is worth about 70 cents USD (fluctuating according to the total amount of subscribers), and I’ve got five downloads over the first 1.5 week period, with a catalog of five corporate tracks (each containing 5 edits in the package). If this turned out to be consistent and to scale linearly, with a 500-track catalog you would make something in the scale of 1000 dollars per month. I’m eager to wait and see how this turns out… 
Ah, interesting Eero. However, perhaps you got a boost from “new tracks”? Of course I wish you the best in any case! 
Tack så mycket, Mikael! 
I suppose a lot of stock music sites have such a “novelty boost” feature in their algorithm indeed. And I intend to harness it by starting to upload on a relatively consistent basis. 
Give this model a couple of years and we will see exactly what I have shared with the letter from MusicVine.
Those sites only make money from people who don’t know how business works, from people who never worked there. Today filmmakers license music from “producers” for $1 – they never ask you how much time and effort was needed to make this piece of music.
The same happens in the opposite direction when composers license the film for putting their tracks under. After a while, people from both sites who actually do the content will realize that it doesn’t pay anything. Aka. content creators kill themselves.
The only way to get out is to go once through it, so more and more creators realize that they again need to take control over their crafts.
I better work for free rather than receiving a paycheck of $1.37 after 4 weeks knowing that the one who pays for the server/website $15.63…you know what I mean. Just imagine how “low” you feel after seeing that for 2-3 days of work you get $1…
By the way, it’s not only happening in the music business, it happens with video-games too. Just Google: Apple vs Fortnite.
Again, those models are only for people who are truly egoists and never think about this “global” mindset what that means for the entire industry. Thus, those guys deserve what they deserve. Be paid what they think they are worth. It’s my opinion. It’s actually very simple: if you don’t like the deal, don’t make it. If you feel bad about it, you will regret it, as you just lost your time and effort for people who never wanted to actually help you succeed, but you helped them to succeed. Very, very questionable…