When you start out selling your own music online (in my case royalty free music) it’s easy to set the selling price too low. This mistake can cost you a lot of money in the long run. Experimenting with pricing is very important to get the best results.
It may seem illogical to set your prices higher than other music producers, but it all comes down to finding that sweet spot where you make the most from your music. If you only set the price at $10 and the music library takes half of that sales price, you need to sell a whole lot of tracks to make some decent money.
How to choose a good selling price
When I started selling my music online I set my prices in the middle of the playing field. In other words I based my pricing on the tracks already on the different stock music sites. This way I could find out if my music would be able to sell at all.
As sales started coming in I then slowly raised my prices to see if the tracks would still sell. So far the higher prices have not reduced the number of sales. When I post a new track to for example RevoStock I set the price as high as possible. That’s $60 for A licence, $40 for the B licence and $30 for the C licence.
At the stock music libraries where you can set the price as heigh as you want, I set the price at $59.95 or higher. For the kind of music I make (trailer, cinematic, motivational) the sweet spot should be around $79.95.This I need more data to confirm, but that’s what I have been able to find out searching countless forums and blogs.
How come the music sells even though the prices are higher?
I think that many people who are buying music from the music libraries are using it for commercial projects. If this holds true a lot of people will have a budget for buying music and if the price are $20 or $30 higher it won’t make much of a difference to them.
If they find the right music they probably won’t spend more time (and thereby indirectly money) looking for some cheaper, that might not even exsist. Another thing that points in this direction is that most commercial projects have very short deadlines. Their boss wants the job done yesterday and the quality to be acceptable.
I base the statements above on common sense and on my own sales. About one third of my tracks are bought using the expensive licensees. When the tracks have a corporate sound, even more are bought using the expensive licences.
Can prices be set to high?
Yes, of cause there is a limit on how high you can set your prices, but I think that many composers set them way to low. If your productions are of an above average quality your prices should also be above average.
I would love to have some insight into the budgets of the buyers have, but at least I can test the pricing myself on the stock music sites. It takes a lot of time, but in the end it will probably also give the best results.
All secrets can be revealed, but you need the right statistics
One of the key elements to succeed in selling any product is setting the right price. To do this in the best possible way you need a lot of statistics. I therefore have to compose much more music, upload to more music libraries and keep those wonderful sales coming in. Then I will have more numbers to work on.
If you have any inputs on how pick the right price when selling products online, you’re more than welcome to post a comment bellow.
Hey Anders, an excellent text article, I have a couple of questions for you, do you think it would be possible to increase its sales to a particular site through youtube advertising, youtube clips where music is tagged, and therefore if the sale goes well the price can be much greater.
I’ve seen a lot of youtube clips where, buy this item on the website www ….
have a huge number viv, realize v and therefore the prices are not as low
I think that most produces that have some money to spend go directly to the stock music library of their choice. So being able to make sales at a higher price from YouTube clicks don’t seem likely to me.
I don’t have any statistics on how well traffic from YouTube converts, but there can be no doubt about a nicely targeted (keyword matched) ad or YouTube video will increase the chances of a click through and a sale.
You cannot set-up advance tracking at the stock music libraries (at least I don’t know any where you can). The best way to test how well YouTube traffic converts would therefore be to set-up your own little web-shop and direct the YouTube traffic there. A little web-shop could for example be set-up with e-junkie to keep the cost minimal 🙂
Thanks for all your very useful posts Anders.
To give you a little insight into the prices that corporate buyers have:
Here in the UK, I have composed for one small corporate video production company who make web-based films. They typically are prepared to pay between £75 and £120 per track, which is around $120 – $190, for standard feelgood rock and pop tracks from Royalty Free Sites.
You are absolutely right to keep your prices high. Corporate buyers can and will pay good money for a track that will make their video better. The tricky thing is composing the kind of track which can be used in a lot of different types of videos.
Best of luck to you.
Thank you very much Sak, this is exactly the kind of information I am looking for. This gives a better idea of staring points when testing track pricing. The price is actually higher than I thought.
And you’re absolutely right about composing music that can be used for lots of different videos is key to making many sales. One “trick” is to compose music that is similar to the best selling tracks on the RF libraries.
I am glad you find the information on the blog useful 🙂