Is the market dead for composers?

I have been here exclusive for over 3 months now, started with 20 tracks and have now 53 tracks online. They are all carefully tagged with 50 keywords and in the pricerange from 15$ to 49$. In this time I had only 1 trackview (plus another one from me).

So, it seems the chance of ever getting something sold is almost zero.
I would be interested in other experiences. Am I doing something wrong?

Hi Audionaut, I also struggle with the same problem (((, although I am registered as non-exclusive. Trying to find ways to promote my library. Hope I will come up with something.

I used to sell tracks. Mostly a video guy, but a few decent tracks up. Those sales stopped. Dead. After spring of 2019. I think I maybe said something bad about somebody. No other reason. The tracks are the same (and better ones added). Go figure. I don't make inane enough music, I think. Working on that. (It's harder than it looks, I found!)

That's way too few tracks to make any kind of money on RF sites. I myself don't have a lot but have had some luck with sales, although they did drop down a lot the last 2 years. Not the sales per se, but rather the commissions.

If you want to have sales regularly most composers will tell you you need upwards of 500 tracks online.

Welcome to the club, so to speak ;) I haven't sold much but something ever so slightly moved in the right direction. Let's face it. As with photos, video, and anything, really, there is an incredible quantity of items everywhere, not just here, and lots of free (and good) stuff, as well.

You have to promote your Pond5 content elsewhere, and make it interesting enough to at least get views, if not sales.

Exclusive (which I am too) or non-exclusive doesn't change your sales success, only the money you get.

It's very hard. If you're original, and want to stand out, it's risky because most likely customers won't need your stuff because it will hardly fit. If you conform with what's already in the catalogue, you'll be drowned in the rest of the content, and have to compete with better established sellers, and so on.

3 months is not much, be patient.

Thank you all for sharing your experiences!

@NeedsSomeMusic: I had too much hope that this platform relieves me of my work. It depends mainly on our own promotion. So is it then the better way to promote and sell our music directly with an own homepage?

@Mizamook and @NewsMarket : Interesting that you both had the same experience that your sales dropped in spring 2019. My supposition is, that at that time was a big promotion on this theme „how to earn money with your music“ in different magazines. I have to commit, that I have been too late in the game because I became aware of it through an article in Beat-magazine this year.

@Talekeeper_Music: Yes, the mass seems to makes it. As you said more than 500 tracks are necessary. But if I had really this ten times as many as now so I could have ten times of trackviews. This would be about 40 trackviews in a year. Clueless assumed that every tenth time you get a sale it would mean to earn about 100$ per year for 500 tracks.

@Dark_Side_of_Synth: Yes, that’s the big question: make the music that’s generally in demand, but then you are one of tens of thousands. Or better be unique? I would go the latter way. I know that there are trends in current soundtracks that are highly demanded but hard to find in stock music libraries. But how could ever someone find you who offers this?


@audionaut That's not quite how it works. The more track you have, the more views your other tracks will have, the algorithm will favor you for uploading more and appearing in searches more, the customers will remember you and you will have returning buyers etc... it's really a compounding effect. You should look at it like this: Every new track you upload increases the value of tracks you already have online.

Ah ok, that makes sense. Thank you for this insight!

This is why we find a composer who has been a member for a year and who has a portfolio of 31,000 songs. someone must explain it to me.

31,000 songs? In one year? Holy moly, that cannot come from a single composer.
Surerly I cannot compete with this in a market that is limited to customers, in particular if your ranking in the search results depend on number of tracks you have uploaded.

Hopefully that is not the case here: In Vi-Control forum there are complaints about stolen tracks uploaded to a site of a competitor of pond5, who doesn't care about that...

In any case, pond5 would be well advised to keep the market attractive for composers by creating fair competitive conditions.