AUDIOTUTS has just published an article on a topic that raises emotional reactions from both sides of the camp, DRM. DRM is a broken technology that punishes the consumer while pirates go virtually unaffected. We don’t use DRM on any of the audio we sell here at AudioJungle, and we never will. Go read the article join the conversation in the comments section, over at AUDIOTUTS:
Thank God for DRM. Without it, the internet would be a cesspool of illegally pirated music, movies and software. Oh, wait, the internet totally is that, because DRM is, quite possibly, the most pointless innovation of the digital age. Companies spend millions of dollars each year coming up with new ways to protect their online content just to see some fifteen year old kid figure out how to circumvent it. Repeat as needed.
But DRM isn’t just an exercise in futility. When you absolutely, positively, must anger every customer you have, few weapons are better than DRM. Take these shenanigans, for example…
5 Biggest Music DRM Debacles of All Time
As most of you will know, a couple of weeks ago we ran the Composition Challenge here on AudioJungle. It was a pretty intense, fun competition and it worked out great. The person who won also happened to be the person most commentators thought should win.
There’s a bit more to his secret to success than just writing great music, though, but the important thing is this: it wouldn’t be possible to build a network and fanbase that works for you unless you have the skill and talent to attract them to your music in the first place.
Since some of you wanted to know how Quange used an effective promotion strategy to win, I thought it would be a good idea to post a link to the article where he explains his techniques. Not just because it might give you some ideas for winning competitions in the future, but because these techniques are equally important for building a fanbase and promoting your musical career. It won’t drop in your lap; “getting discovered” doesn’t happen. You have to work for it.
Go on over and read How to Win Prizes in Music Contests.
The artist is in a position of power. Creators working within the arts and entertainment play a huge role in defining culture and influencing the public discourse.
Despite the fact that Blog Action Day (run by the folks here at Envato) for this year has finished, there’s no reason to stop the discourse on important issues. Poverty still exists.
Throughout history, there are many, many examples of people who used the power of the arts to inform and change the minds of the individual, and influence the collective. The arts have changed the world repeatedly. Musicians have the power to speak to the people and impart a message, and it’s not all in vain. These words and stories have real power.
Remember that the issues that matter most to you can be communicated through your work and you can go to sleep at night knowing you’ve used your skills and talent to enhance the world and furthered the discourse on the most important and urgent maladies that impact upon the human race.
Just a short note to remind you that, despite life’s daily struggles, the things you create do have the power to create change.
To make the pricing system fairer for everybody, we’ve implemented a new pricing policy. Our recent change in the pricing system meant that we based file pricing on track length (other than a few exceptions, such as packs). Some authors have been creating loops only a few bars long, and then repeating the loop for as long as a few minutes.
We don’t feel this is fair to honest authors who upload their loops in single format (which is inherently more useful for buyers in the first place), so from today on we’ll be pricing tracks that are nothing more than one sound looped repeatedly by counting only the first loop-through and disregarding the rest.
This will not affect files that have already been accepted by our reviewers, though it may be subject to change during annual reviews in the future.
I’ve been writing a couple of articles over at FreelanceSwitch about the benefits of selling stock and thought I’d mention the second one in particular, here as a good reference for AudioJungle authors:
Like anything, selling stock is something that you get better at over time. In my job working on ThemeForest, FlashDen and AudioJungle I get to see a lot of the things people do to maximize their income, some of them are quite ingenious. Since it benefits us if we have clever authors on our sites and it benefits Freelancers interested in selling stock, I’ve put together my top tips for selling well on stock sites…
Read the rest of the article at FreelanceSwitch
Congratulations to Quange, who racked up an awesome 258 votes before the polls closed. You’re the winner of a brand new Mbox 2 Pro! We’ll be in contact with you about shipping details soon.
Quange’s track was a pleasure to listen to and it’s no surprise that he won, and in fact, voters were telling me how great his track was even when only had a couple of votes. He has sure stepped on the pedal since then. You can listen for yourself here if you missed it before.
Honorable mentions go to:
They had great tracks. Go check them out. And, to all the other participants of this contest, thanks for your participation! We look forward to doing this again sometime.
We recently hired a voice actor to create a new watermark with us. With the growth that AudioJungle and Envato as a whole has been experiencing lately, it was high time to change the watermark to something more relevant.
Thus, we’ve released the new Envato watermark, a watermark that will fortunately stay relevant no matter how many new sites we release. You can download this from the usual place.
If you’ve got a big portfolio of sounds, don’t worry; you won’t be forced to redo the preview files with the new watermark (though if you choose to update your tracks, we won’t stop you, and that would be helpful). Just start watermarking your new tracks with this file.
However, we may start knocking back new tracks with the old watermark in the near future, so make sure you download the new guy (it’s a woman, actually!) and start using that one instead.
It’s time to find out which one of you guys has produced the crowd favorite for the Composition Challenge - and in turn, which one of you gets a brand spankin’ new Mbox 2 Pro.
Listen to the tracks in the list below, choose your favorite and then head on below to the poll and vote for it. And remember to choose carefully: once you’ve voted, the poll won’t allow you to vote again. Read More …
