Since my last income report back in June 2012 I have made more sales. I now have 12 finished tracks, but only at pond5, revostock and productiontrax are all of them uploaded. These are my total earnings since I started composing and selling stock music in February 2012
Pond5 has sold 5 tracks – $97
Revostock has sold 7 tracks – $106
Productiontrax has sold 7 tracks – $245
AudioMicro has sold 1 track – $14
Affiliate earnings from the music libraries – $54
In total $516 in sales
The process of staying focused to get results
To be honest, when it comes to my project of composing and selling stock music, I’m kind of disappointed. Not because of the number of the uploads / sales ratio, but with myself. I have in no way completed and uploaded as many tracks as I set out to do. This is clearly reflected in the results.
- Firstly 12 tracks are in no way enough to make some decent cash.
- Secondly if no work on promotion is done the chances of making sales are much lower.
When I started this project I had a quite ambitious a plan of completing a track every third day. If I had done that I would have had 100 tracks by now. Looking at the $516 above each track has made me an average of $43 in a year. Multiply that by a 100 tracks and it would have been $4300 instead.
Also my project of promoting my music using a niche website has come to a hold. I simply got tired of working on it and the site has therefore not given any results. I might spend some time on the niche site in 2013, but my main focus will be on composing and uploading new tracks.
So get on with it – make some stock music!
I 2012 I spent a lot of time on my other projects (affiliate niche websites) and have achieved very good results. This however does not change the fact that I was planning to compose a lot of music as well. I had the time to compose, but spend it on something unimportant.
Procrastination has reared its ugly head and made it hard to get the compositions finished and uploaded. When no one is around to tell you to get on with it, it can be difficult to stay focused – even in projects where we work with something we love.
This year I have to get my act together and start getting more music out there. I have in no way abandoned this project and in 2013 my goal is to get to a total of 50 tracks online. This should absolutely be possible – I just have to remind myself how good it fells when you get an email with the title “You’ve had a sale!”
I wish you all the best of luck in composing and selling lots of great music in 2013 🙂
[starrater tpl=10]
Hi,
I recognised myself in this article (the procrastination part), I have a lot of unfinished new tracks that need to be done but I’ve been lazy on that part ..and promotion too (because I mainly focused on my band..) but you still did some sales which is always good news! 🙂
Btw, you wrote “Rootstock” instead of “revostock”…
Good luck for 2013!
Yes, tell me about it. I think I have well above 20 tracks that are uncompleted. We really have to get in there and get them done. Finishing a track feels great so we must kind of crazy 😉 when we continue to create new compositions instead.
Right now I am completing two new tracks and have three old ones I posted on YouTube before I even began this project. So at least five tracks will soon be uploaded and ready for sale.
ditto. i always have a couple dozen songs unfinished, in the works or in my head!
I feel your pain, as I’ve had similar demons myself. I highly recommend reading “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield if you need a good positive kick in the butt…
Best of luck to you in this coming year!
Thanks Ken, I never heard of “The War of Art” I will have a go at it, books can truely be a great source of inspiration 🙂
When it comes to motivation and getting projects done, listening to “The Luck Factor by Brian Tracy” can also give a boost. “The New Psycho-Cybernetics” are one of my favourite books.
thx for the valuable analysis!
i’m on pond5, revostock, music revolution and audiojungle, but with more than 80 tracks.
i must say tha AJ is the one that sells the most: i’m there since august 2012 and i had over 60 sales.
i uploaded on pond5, revostock and music revolution on christmas 2012
In 1.5 months, i had just 4 sales on P5. No activity on revo* sites… let’s hope for the future!
based on your consideration, I will try also production trax…
🙂
bye!
Sales can be unreliable as I’m sure you have experienced. You could be the best of the best but if people don’t happen to need the tracks you’ve made they end up sitting on the shelf.
The original point was the golden rule:
Get as much out there on as many marketplaces as possible then advertise yourself.
Some sites aren’t great at advertising their latest content so give them (and yourself) a boost by advertising on your site, social media, blogs and anywhere else your potential customers are.
Keep pushing and never surrender! 😛
Well, below is my actual commission for April. Except for Pond5 and Productiontrax, I just signed up on the rest about 3 weeks ago so it’s too early to tell. I’m either still waiting for my tracks to get approved on several of them. I have roughly 115-125 tracks on most of them. Income was not as good as I had hoped but better than in the past. The “platinum” sale on themusicase really helped. We’ll see what May brings.
APRIL 2013 TOTAL: $248
Audiojungle: $65
Audiomicro:
BuyStockSound:
Luckstock:
Music Case: $117
Musiko:
Pond5: $27
Productiontrax: $39
Revostock:
Tunefruit:
Tunesociety:
YouLicense:
that’s really great!
congratulations!!!
i’m sure that your AJ sales will raise a lot and you will have to consider to go exclusive with them in several months from now! 🙂
Yes, AJ does see more action. I was almost selling one or two a day… but nothing now for 4 days. We’ll see…. Still can’t believe Revostock has only approved 3 of my songs after more than a month. What takes them so long?
Congrats on your sales so far! AudioJungle looks interesting to me as they seem to get alot of action. The music that does well there seems to be geared towards the YouTube and Corporate crowds so I’m going to have a go at writing exclusive for them in those genres.
Same here for Revostock. I uploaded 21 tracks and its been a couple weeks so far.
A question for any of you, I just sold a track at Productiontrax for an extended license and was wondering if I have to go register that track at my PRO, (BMI) to collect potential royalties or is that done for me?
Congrats on your sales so far and keep going! I’m confident that you can make some decent money selling your music.
Thank you for posting your results. It’s awesome to see how other other people are doing in this business. 🙂
Good question about BMI… I am totally ignorant about the PRO issue although all my songs are registered with them also. Let me know what you find out.
We’ll see how it goes. Selling music this way is so random and arbitrary. I’ve only sold one song on AJ the past week. I’m hooking up with some other musicians on SoundCloud who sell this way and getting thoughts from them. Most have told me they do better actually getting a contract from a music library or company. Obviously. But that’s harder to make happen.
I’ve had 10 out of 50 submitted songs forwarded on taxi.com. Three forwarded this week were of the ambient genre. Hoping that leads to something…. but it can often take months to hear back from anyone… if you do.
BTW, I got my first payment from CD Baby by selling music online to the public (iTunes, Amazon, etc) $108 in six months!! Ha! Not much eh? But better than nothing. Selling music for 0.99 a track is not a way to get rich… for sure! But it’s nice to know someone out there likes your music enough to purchase. I also get income almost everyday from Spotify plays… but get this… you make only .01 for every 3 streams! Can you imagine how long it would take to make $100??? 🙂
In time I will probably do a second music library list here on the site. On this list sites more focused on music licensing will be represented. By this I think of sites like Taxi.com, MusicDealers, redcola and MusicSupervisor.
At these site you have to a member of a PRO and they are more focused at pitching your music and making you money by back end royalties.
What do you know about http://www.videoblocks.com? You can submit music… they also have an interesting option where they will make you an offer up front for your music, pay you and then feature it on their site. You get no royalties this way. Not sure if I could go that route.
I never heard of them, but I took a quick look at the site. You cant find out how much they pay, how much the music cost or anything else on their site. Download as much as you want for free in 7 days, don’t leave much for the composers 😉
Also I would never sell the rights to my music, but others might find this a viable way of doing things. Think really careful about it before going down this road, our copyright is one of the most important things we have.
Agree. Did a little checking and saw some complaints about them and how they charge people even for the “free” downloads. I am steering clear!
BTW, some of the clips on this site have 10,000 downloads! Even the last page of 350 shows at least 1 download…. hmmmm.
Anders, you could almost start a forum with all of our random commenting on your site 😉
Yeah I have thought about it, but it will be further down the road. My experience in starting forums tells me that you need a lot of visitors for a forum to remain active. Nothing worse than a half dead forum on a site to make users go away.
I’m currently adding libraries to the stock music library list as new are mentioned by you all in the comments. This should make it a little easier for new users to find the info their are looking for and keep the other posts clear of some of the “random ramblings”.
Oh and I don’t mind your random commenting. I’m just happy with the activity here at the blog, so thank you all for making this site worth revisiting! 🙂
hi!
these are my statements for audiojungle:
August 2012 8 Sales $47.85
September 2012 6 Sales $13.86
October 2012 13 Sales $57.42
November 2012 6 Sales $25.41
December 2012 11 Sales $27.06
January 2013 14 Sales $33.66
February 2013 19 Sales $47.19
March 2013 13 Sales $54.12
April 2013 16 Sales $46.20
May 2013 4 Sales $21.12
the total is about 400 $ and now i have 116 items on sale
consider that i have uploaded my AJ portfolio slowly and i have a lot of logos which sell for very little money!
on pond5 i have 11 sales since jan 2013 for a total of 81$. in this case all the portfolio was uploaded at once…
production trax is at 0 (still to upload a lot of things – started in april 2013)
revostock is a 13.5$ (60 items, started at the end of 2012)
music revolution is at 0 (started fall 2012).
Matteo: Thanks for posting this. I’m beginning to think, in spite of low commission, that AJ might be the best place. I’ve been on AJ for about 3 weeks and have made $88.00 (16 sales) so far. 99% of my music are full length songs.
I’m going to see how things go for 3-6 months and then may decide to go exclusive with them.I have yet to make anything on AudioMicro and I’m still waiting for Revostock to even approve 124 tracks for over a month.
What’s your username on AJ? I’d like to follow you.
BTW, can I still sell on iTunes, Amazon, emusic, etc if I go exclusive with AJ?
you can find me on audiojungle here:
http://audiojungle.net/user/bosone
acutally, i have the same feeling… maybe in the future i will also go exclusively with AJ… but no, you cannot sell the same songs on iTunes or similar if you are exclusive with AJ…
hmm, well, all my music is online everywhere so that might be a hassle to get ti all removed.
Here is my May totals. About the same as April thanks to two extended licenses on Productiontrax. Would love to make this per week. Still have zero sales on several places but finally got one sale on LuckStock. I’ve had a lot of views on YouLicense and Tunesociety but no sales. I was surprised nothing sold on Pond5 either. We’ll see what June brings.
MAY 2013 Total: $242
Audiojungle: $70
Audiomicro:
BuyStockSound:
Luckstock: $11
Music Case: $12
Musiko:
Pond5:$
Productiontrax: $113
Revostock: $36
Tunefruit:
Tunesociety:
YouLicense:
that’s great!
here’s mine:
pond5: 32
audiojungle: 56.13
revostock:0 (clip views are not increasing at all…)
music revolution : 0 (thinking about leaving this place!)
production trax : 0 (but still have to upload a lot of trax, in any case, with 17 tracks online i get about 5-10 views per day on average)
Hello again guys,
I have to be honest… I’m a bit put off by the number of sales people are reporting here at eaglecinematics.com. I admit that I only have one song that I uploaded to productiontrax a few days ago, but then I’m looking at the 100+ songs (that are all good, by the way) by matteo and David Hollandsworth and the very VERY little amount of revenue being generated by them.
I’m hearing people talking about how they’re making a living doing this… $200-$400 in 2-10 months doesn’t sound like any such example, however. Do you have to be good, or do you have to have a good distribution package? Why do these people talk about how it “took them a long time to be able to make a living selling stock music”? What took them a long time… writing the songs? Finally figuring out what people were all buying? Saving up enough money to pay for a big advertising program? I don’t understand……
I already gave you guys the link to http://www.dayinthelifeofacommercialmusician.com/, but I know Anders stated that he was making more sales with less hits per song when Michael from the website posted his mathematical formula for what kind of sales you can expect per view. I’m having a hard time figuring this out….. and I’m also getting worried that it’s going to take about 3000 of the same songs on at least 50-100 different libraries if we’re going to be able to quit our day jobs.
no doubts the figures are low and i just can’t imagine living with stock music…
in my case 90% I uploaded were composed years ago as a hobby, without the purpose to sell them.
I began writing music tailored for stock markets about 1 year ago but i did not write so many songs.
I don’t have particular suggestions to give you, but #1 would be to try to get the attention on forums. I have also started a youtube channel in which i publish my audiojungle music but i really views are so low and there are so many royalty free videos on youtube that you simply get lost in them.
probably successfull people on stock market have an enstablished portfolio of clients built during years along their “standard” studio/producer activity and / or they are very good in marketing their song.
in my case stock music income are a nice small extra but of course i just stopped dreaming about becoming rich! 😀
this is all pretty new to me. in 2012 i only sold tracks on pond5 and prouductiontrax… made about $50/mo. by selling on 11 sites, at least now i’m close to making $300/mo. (contrary to my post above i actually made $277 last month) if i lived in my car and ate only beans i could make a living!!! lol.
i cannot figure out how the top sellers on audijungle sell per week what i sell in a month… and that’s often on just one song! my first goal is to make $500/mo. anything else would be frosting on the cake!
btw, i also submit songs to various listings on taxi and film music network. i’ve had a dozen forwards but no signings or $$$. last week i had a 30 sec spot for a NY ad agency forwarded. fee for the song chosen? $15k-$25k!! of course, there are thousands submitting for this so i am not expecting anything. but it was nice to be considered.
Ok David…. let’s evaluate what you did here.
You started off with only Pond5, but then you went to 11 libraries. In other words, for every 150 songs you have, you’ll make 1.6 more for every 10 top notch libraries you upload to. If you were on 20 top notch libraries, that would be $480. 30 and it would be $768, 40 and it would be $1228, 50 and it would be $1966.
Now I am not saying that this equation is acurate… what I’m doing is taking $300 and then multiplying it by 1.6, then multiplying the new total ($480 here) by 1.6 again… and so on. Now let’s just cut out the factors that create bad business months, libraries that aren’t as good at advertising as others and other factors that seem to have no name, yet take place in all businesses ahyway. We’ll just divide the last total by 1.6 to compensate (just for the sake of argument) and that gives you $1228 monthly.
Now what if you had twice the amount of songs you have now? How about 300 or so… I think it might be safe to say the total would be double $1228, hence $2457. How about 600 hundred songs? Double $2457 and now its $4915. After taxes come every April 15th and that’s $3276 net monthly. Does this sound reasonable? Does my math here become grounded in valid-enough logic?
Don’t forget, there’s more than 50 libraries you can upload to… heck, http://www.musiclibraryreport.com/ is currently reviewing 400+… but you need to pay for a membership for that site. Either way, use the unlisted equation I just mentioned and add those extra libraries to your goal (?) of 600 songs. Hey, that’s more money than I make at my job presently – including what comes out for health benefits.
My goal, if my “equation” here is correct, would be for 600 of the same songs on 80 libraries at least. I’d be MORE than satisfied with that!
mathematics! i’m always uploading new songs… maybe 5-10/mo so my goal would be to have around 300, if not more. i’ve had a few places decline my music; some said it didn’t fit, some said becuz i’m on “cheap” places like audiojungle, audiomicro, etc. 400 places??? wish we could get that list. anyone have one? or at least would like the list of 50. thanks for this insight. i thought i would try about 12 sites for 6 months and see how it goes…. but looks like going with more now is worth it.
i’m going to plunk down a little $$$ and join music library report for a month and then set off to join as many libraries as i can and see what happens. I will report back. I now have almost 150 songs in my portfolio… some better than others. 🙂
Wow… you’re really going to go for the gold, huh?
ha! yeah….
Well, updating for June. About 1/3 what I made in April and May. Who knows why? It’s very random how sales go in this business.
JUNE 2013 Total: $94
Audiojungle:$34
Audiomicro:$10
BuyStockSound:
Luckstock:
Million Duck:
Musicase:$23
Musiko:
Pond5:
Productiontrax:
Revostock: $27
Soundcheque:
Tunefruit:
Tunesociety:
YouLicense:
thanks david.
mine is:
pond5: 45 (2 tracks sold)
audiojungle: 68 (22 tracks, most are logos) + 13$ from referred users
revostock: 18 (2 tracks)
music revolution : 0
production trax : 0 (uploaded a lot of tracks, now i have 45. still 3-7 views per day )
I wrote to themusicase asking if and how i can join their library.
in any case, i agree it’s a very random market, and from my konwledge from other users, july and august should be slower months…
Well… July was close to my April/May sales; still wish I could double this amount. I also joined 909 Music. I’m kind of puzzled by zero sales on Pond5 and ProductionTrax for 2 straight months now.
JULY 2013 $235
909 Music:
Audiojungle: $75
Audiomicro: $13
BuyStockSound:
Luckstock:
Million Duck:
Musicase: $130
Musiko:
Pond5:
Productiontrax:
Revostock:
Soundcheque:
Tunefruit: $15
Tunesociety:
YouLicense:
Zukkio:
for you it was a good month! 🙂
pond5: 55
audiojungle: 43
revostock: 0
music revolution : 0
production trax : 0
yeah, as long as i get an extended/wide license somewhere it seems to do well.