Sell your Music on Pond 5 & Audiojungle (successfully)

Hello Composers, Mike here! :slight_smile:

I want to hear from all of you who are selling your music on Pond 5 and/or Audiojungle, so we can share tips and experiences in order to get more license sales on the stock music market.

Some things to discuss:

  • How to Title the track in the best way?
  • What Tags to include?
  • What is a good description?
  • How to promote your tracks for more sales?
  • What styles/genres/tempo/mood work best?
  • Creating stems
  • Creating collections

Please share your tips, experiences, thoughts and ideas on selling your music on Pond 5 and Audiojungle as successfully as possible.

Iā€™m tagging @BrianJ since I know he has had some success on Pond5 and intends to boost his sales a lot in the coming year(s).

Sincerely,
Mikael ā€œMikeā€ Baggstrƶm
Founder of professionalcomposers.com

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I have 142 tracks on Pond 5 - for about 9 months now - and ZERO sales. Starting to get listens but zilch. Iā€™m either doing something wrong, pricing too high - or maybe the musicā€™s just crap LOL.

Be very interested to hear anyoneā€™s formula for success on Pond 5.

Sorry to hear that Andrew, did you also try Audiojungle?
What do you price the tracks at on average?

I would assume it is a lot about the track info: title, tags, description etc. But I also want to learn more about all of this! =)

Havenā€™t tried Audiojungle - yet - my prices on Pond 5 range from Ā£25 - Ā£80.
I also have music with Media Music Now, BunkerMusik, SingReadr and Soundcloud

Sounds like a reasonable price range so I donā€™t believe that would be a problem. Did you analyse top selling tracks on titling, descriptions and tags?

I havenā€™t - I probably havenā€™t done enough ā€˜marketingā€™ work at all - just uploaded, tagged and priced and crossed my fingers. I think itā€™s going to take more time - but Iā€™m looking forward to hear what others do too.

From what Iā€™ve heard most users search for mood or style keywords, so it is essential your titles include keywords. And of course this means your tags should be used to the max and even including the main keywords in the description I assume will help.

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I have 20 Tracks at Pond5 and there were all accepted, but not on Audiojungle, which seems to be very hard to get acceptance. Pond5 is easy to use, still waiting for sales :smiley: or waiting for payouts because they collect it until a certain sum, like Audiojungeā€¦ :wink: What I dislike with Audiojungle is the complicated uploading-system. The composer has to embed the watermark himself and they seem not to be able to read out the track-length. No hard job for professionals, but it takes time from our side which could be solved much more easier.

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I agree on the Audiojungle uploading system is crap. Itā€™s silly that they have not fixed an automatic watermarking system yet.

Did you get sales on Audiojungle, but not enough for payout? How long until your first sale?

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I have a number of tracks on Pond5 and had a couple of sales, nothing spectacular mind but at least I have sold a few. I played around with AudioJungle but tracks that have sold elsewhere do not get accepted. I think it is a complete random lottery if you get accepted by AJ.

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How many tracks do you have on Pond5, and for how long have you been there?

Also what style of tracks have been selling?

Sincerely
Mike

I have around 45 tracks uploaded varying from actual music tracks to Foley sound effects. Strangely it is the Foley sounds that have performed the best as I have only sold a couple of ambient soundscapes.

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Hi everybody,

Good to see there are others in the RF world too. I have a lot of different thoughts on this. The best thing I did for myself was to become focused on it. I say this as it pertains to me and my situation. I work a full time job and was trying to do too many different things with music. So almost a year I ago, I found a video on youtube by Daniel Carraliez (sorry if spelling is wrong) and his channel is Stock Music Licensing. Watching his videos I became convinced I could make some decent side cash.

There were (and still are sometimes) some hard truths that I had to accept:

  1. I am writing music. It may not always be what I want to write and seems too simple, but that is what people wantā€¦ think corporate music. Look it up on pond5 or Audiojungle, you will get the gist of it. So I had to treat this as a job and learn to write differently and not just what I want.

  2. I have 71 tracks up on Pond5 since last August. My goal was to hit 100 tracks by August 15. It is not going to happen. I am okay with that. I still did a lot of focused work. I have made 6 sales in the year. (3 in the last month and a half on the same track!) I expect that will change a lot in the coming year with this experience under my belt. I have licensed tracks from $20 to $35.

  3. Egoā€¦ again I have to not get too emotionally attached to the tracks. That means I write them and submit them. No agonizing for weeks on a track because it is not perfect. I donā€™t try to write 1,000 track songs. I am getting crazy if I get above 15. So I write them, donā€™t get attached, and I keep it simple. (no crazy key changes, no sudden tempo drops, simple structure.)

  4. Keywords and Titling - the keywords I just about have that down at this point as you use them over and over really. This is a really broad topic and I know people are really curious about it. I could do a post on this seperately.

  5. Persistence - 71 tracks in a year means I am doing over a track a week. I have finally gotten comfortable with doing 30 second and 15 second edits too. (Triple your output! My track that has 3 sales, one of them was the 30 second cut!) So structure your music so you can do those versions easily and increase your volume of output.

  6. Briefings - Pond5 has started sending out briefings at the beginning of the month telling you what kind of music they are looking for, keywords to use, and suggested titles. How much easier could it be? Also those tracks get approved almost instantly. So you have to just produce the music they are looking for.

So I am not an expert. I wish I had more tracks licensed, but I donā€™t at this point. I am curious to see how the fall goes. I did not license my first track until November last year. So I have licensed 6 tracks in 8 months. (Beginning December to End of July) Almost 1 a month. I am okay with that. I am not trying to make a living off this right now. I am building a catalog of music and looking at the long term. I hope in 10-15 years I can retire and do this well enough to keep comfortable. Thatā€™s my plan. And I am sticking to it.

Cheers,

Brian

Feel free to reach out if you need help or have questions.

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Iā€™ve not even read your post yet, but man you are just proving my hope and vision was right. These kinds of structured, well formatted and valuable posts does not simply happen on FB groups, reddit or whatever. Thank you so much Brian, I really hope you will become a loyal member of the community, after seeing this post (now I am going to actually read it lol) :stuck_out_tongue:

Alright read it now. Very good points, and I especially resonate with point 3. I think I need to force myself to keep it stupid simple (KISS). Itā€™s just so fricking hard to keep things simple when I am doing the opposite with piano practice, cinematic music etc. The more I push my own skills and boundaries, the harder I find keeping things simple.

Point 1) Yes! Why do I keep creating orchestral soundtrack type tracks when I should really do motivational, inspirational simple chord progressions type of music. That is what sells in the RF market, heck even in the exclusive libraries motivational and uplifting music seems to be one of the biggest styles.

Point 4) You know, that gave me an idea! I have been working on a Google Sheet to collect all kinds of keywords/tags organised into columns, to be able to copy paste fast when publishing. I could do a resource post and share it here with the community! =)

I love the humble ending of your post to. I am allergic to arrogance and high horse attidude (will ban all those people if they come here) and you sir are setting an excellent example of humility. Iā€™m one your side my friend, letā€™s win this game of music licensing! :wink:

I did start trying to submit to AJ a few years ago and was really getting down about the rejections. I felt like, if I canā€™t get into AJ, no way I can get into production libraries for movies, TV, etc. So I went back and really honed my craft and kept at it. Not saying i am great or anything, but getting into Pond5 was a great move for me. It gave me the confidence that I can write music of value. I have not thought twice about going back to AJ. Also Pond5 does the watermarking for you! Take that AJ!

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The fact that AJ still forces you to manually add watermarks is a big factor in me not wanting to go there. Itā€™s like they still live in the 90s! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Andrew, what kind of music are you writing? The style of music they seem to most look for are the Corporate music (bane of my existence, but I have made peace with it). Also Pond5 sends out monthly briefings now to let you know what they are looking for.

https://contributor.pond5.com/what-to-create/music-briefs/

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I try to write in a wide variety of styles but corporate hasnā€™t been one of them. Iā€™ll give it a go and see if things improve. Search awpMusic on P5 to hear it! :slight_smile:

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BrianJ - thanks for your insights shared above. Really interesting to read.

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