(or “My Experience on Audiojungle and some other random stuff”)

A few months ago, I (very enthusiastically) joined a great online community, namely audiojungle.net, where some awesome musicians sell royalty-free, project-based music at prices that would better fit a flea market or a thrift store.

The enthusiasm has since faded away, as did my hopes of an additional income. As far as I managed to figure out (and I didn’t dig very well, so this might not be right) , audiojungle.net is practically Australian-based, as well as the entire Envato marketplace, which it is part of.  The initiative behind the whole thing is obviously well-intentioned and the guys running it are doing a pretty good job.

What didn’t work out for me was the fact that the sale-system is pretty newbie-unfriendly. Keep in mind, I’m talking about the system, not the community. Top authors on the marketplace are being promoted much more than others, as well as best-selling items. The way this works results in a select group of authors selling a select few tracks and racking up thousands of sales while the rest of the authors barely get by and the vast majority of buyers keep purchasing the same tracks over and over again. This means that quality of work is not the best way of reaching a decent number of sales and level of income on the marketplace.

I’m not saying that the top authors aren’t some of the best on there, but the only two ways for gaining buyers and self-promotion that I’ve figured out to work on audiojungle.net are either spamming the “new items” section daily (as I’ve seen some authors do) or being hand-picked for promotion and inclusion in top quality music packs by the guys who run the site. The first option basically excludes quality, in my opinion. Unless there are 5 people using the same account, an author can’t both constantly churn up at least 5 tracks every day to keep visibility on the front page and assure their quality. I work on a track for at least 10 hours on end and a truly good song (made by people who do little or nothing else) actually takes days or weeks to make.

The second option would be a massive stroke of luck that not everyone can have.

Truth be told, I didn’t push as much as I could have, and of the few sales I managed to make, most of them got a five-out-of-five star rating. I could have made more tracks and posted more links to them on other websites. Whatever the situation, what I managed to figure out is that this particular system doesn’t work for me as well as I hoped at first. I’m not giving up on it, but my expectations have plummeted, so what I’ll be uploading on there will mostly be stuff rejected everywhere else.

I know I’m probably being a little hard on the situation, but I’m actually not bashing audiojungle.net.  I’m just describing my experience with it and why it didn’t work for me. The guys there are awesome, and they deserve way more attention than they get. (this includes the moderators and the guys who run the thing) I genuinely consider the site to be awesome and a great musical resource.

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In other news, my resident artist‘s been working on some artwork for promotion purposes. Munko the mascot is still in the works, but a font has been chosen, modified and can be seen on the lower right corner of this blog.