It’s the first time I hear about Pond 5, will have a look! Thanks for sharing!
I wanted to share with you my experience with AJ so far. Registered on their platform couple of months ago, and although I am an easy going person, their processes, requirements and their upload system made me kinda mad… I got a lot of positive opinions for AJ from friends, but I wasn’t able to establish a good connection with them, since I keep on getting rejected after submitting several projects and with no further explanation on what am I missing (speaking as content creator who already sold tenths of audio logos for various companies, I wouldn’t say my production does not meet industry standard criteria whatsoever…)
On the other hand, the terms they apply are kinda too harsh for me, but in the end we are their customers and we could only agree…
Hey Venn, yes I know your music quality is already really high and professional. AJ is a hit and miss, I think they prefer some genres way more than others. And also, I hate their uploading system.
I can promise you that Pond 5 is a way better experience. Also Pond 5 is 50/50, even while you can still be non-exclusive with them.
Yes I forgot about that! 50/50 non exclusive on Pond5. The upload is easy and they keep track of your most commonly used tags as well, so you can just go down the list and check them.
One thing AJ is great for though, is seeing the number of sales on a track/genre. Kind of tedious, but you can gleam info from that. I have yet to really sot down try it in earnest but it is on my list of things to do.
I wanna share my own opinion about Pond 5 and Audiojungle. I don’t wanna be rude or give you some false info, i just wanna express my own experience, so if you got more lucky than me it’s great.
Some time ago, like some years ago some of my friends recommend me to start making corporate music for Pond 5 and audio jungle. At first i created my first account on audio jungle like 3-4 years ago, and i just dropped a few of my soundtrack like tracks and a couple (20) FXs. So that time audio jungle accepted all of my tracks and my FXs. I made around 20 with my FXs in 3 months. And none with my cinematic music. Then i left it for a year. So in a year i decided to try audio jungle once again, that time they hardly approved just 1 of my tracks out of 5. Again no money, no glory, no fame. Because i tried to compose more and more but it was really hard because i was getting rejects like all the time.
Last year i tried Pond5 and audio jungle again. AJ rejected all of my 20 tracks like within 3 months. Pond5 approved all of my 20 tracks. And i made around 10 for selling only 1 of my tracks out of 20 on Pond5 in 6-9 months.
Then i joined Produce Like A pro community, PureMix, Mix With The Masters (only free account), and Nail The mix, now its been just one but very productive year since I’m mixing a lot. And watching thousands and thousands of sound production tutorials on you tube from the best mixing and mastering engineers in the world. Well guys built their career on making music from “the Beatles” to “Christina Aguilera” so i guess they are much more experienced in mixing and sound production. And the most funniest thing that now we have a couple of “Elite Composers” from AJ in PLAP community. Who decided to spread their knowledge in mixing. One of “elite composers” from AJ told me , that now Aj is a total trash, too many composers and tracks and most of tracks made by people who don’t understand anything about music, especially about mixing. So After mixing lots of multitracks in different genres from “PLAP” to “nail The Mix” i came to the idea that AJ is only about quantity but not quality. Today i listened to some tracks from AJ, don’t get me rude or arrogant but man these tracks are so poorly mixed. But the guy made around 300 sales in 1 year.
I don’t know guys, to me if a person has no knowledge about music and mixing but for some unknown to me reason he’s selling music on Aj and Pond5 its not a way to go. As i understood after 1 year of mixing mostly that it’s all about sound production. And music on AJ and Pond5 is not so good in a comparison to music tracks of Christina Aguilera lol. So i made my way in mixing music now, and composing scores for short movies. Don’t even wanna try to go back to Aj and pond5. To me it’s all in vain now. But again its only my experience maybe you really made around 1000s of $ by selling music on Aj and Pond5. Im not so lucky in this case.
P.S.: and yes if a few years go AJ wrote me a reason for rejecting of my tracks, so now (in 2018) they reejected my tracks with no explanation. The game is called “take a guess why” lol … Im very stupid at taking any guesses lol so i quit after 3 months of hard work with no result.
Thank you for sharing your experience Alexey. I was afraid of this, because it’s not the only “horror story” I heard from AJ this year. I decided personally to stay away from them, but I had hoped Pond 5 was better, but I guess not.
Did you take any action on this? Like finding other “better” music libraries?
No Mike, I gave up. I came to the idea that you can create your own web site or you tube channel and you can promote your own corporate or any kind of music via your you tube channel. Cuz everybody knows that people are buying views sometimes for you tube videos . So in this case you can buy 100K views just for one of your tracks and some people will buy it. But I’m more about mixing now cuz people pay money for the mixing at once.
Sometime, the Alu-hat is burning, I know… but just one question: if there’s a big company like AJ, who is doing the review of the tracks? Are these employees or 3rd party composers who are also contributing their own tracks?
Employees of the company. Also recently Pond5 has cut the artist share of revenue. It went from 50% to 35%, which is a 30% cut. Most unfortunate and there are plenty of angry composers right now with the platform. I have put a lot of work into my account there, so i am not pulling my tracks yet. I raised my prices some and will keep looking for other libraries to contribute to and keep my options open.
I started selling stuff at AudioJungle and Pond5 this month, when I had 2 music tracks and 9 sound effects online at AJ, I had sold four licenses, now I have two songs more. At Pond5 I haven’t sold anything yet.
I’ve had two rejects, one for a technical error at Pond5 (they don’t accept sound packs) and one sound effect wasn’t good enough for AJ (I admit I was kind of testing how low quality is accepted). Often the rejections seem to be justified and the quality is just not high enough, but I’ve also seen a few songs at envato forums that were not that bad and were still rejected. There is a person doing the reviews so there’s always room for errors.
I promote my tracks in twitter, soundcloud and youtube, but I don’t think they bring any traffic at this point since I haven’t don’t this even for a month and I’m starting from scrach. I’m thinking about starting an Instagram account also.
Thanks! The first two of the sales came from one of the two (now four) songs, the second two were from two different sound effects, so 50/50.
The music track that sold twice already is a very typical ukulele/claps/piano/glockenspiel-style overly cheerful piece
I usually make 3-5 different length versions of the songs that I include in the pack since it’s not that big of a job to add them. I don’t know how much it helps with the sales but it doesn’t hurt to include them.
Now I just hope that I get constant sales in the future also and this wasn’t just a fluke
It’s quite early to make any bigger assumptions, not enough data yet, but atleast I got some sales straight off the bat
I wonder if Pond 5 is just a harder place to sell stuff, it’s way more saturated or if something has to be done differently compared to AudioJungle. I’m getting constant sales at AudioJungle, but even though I have the same stuff at Pond 5 with the same descriptions and more keywords, I have less page views at Pond 5 than I have sales in AJ.
How many tracks did you have at Pond 5 when you had your first sale?
