WARNING: Do not update your files

Just some advice to anyone who wants to update their files (replace older wav files with newly mastered ones etc), DON'T DO IT. I just did this last week with 6 of my best-selling tracks, and was told by two different staff members prior to doing so that all stats would transfer over and it would not affect anything negatively. Well to make a long story short, this has been a nightmare and now my tracks are at the bottom of the search engine (they've already been re-indexed too)

Many emails back and forth to support, lots of screenshots and nothing has been resolved almost a week later. All 6 tracks' revenue stats have been reset to zero, and initially the sales stats also reset but have since been fixed. However, none of them show up in the search engine like before. For example, my song "Inspirational Uplifting Background" used to be #3 in the results for "uplifting". Now I can't even find it in the first 1000 results. This was my best selling track too. The other 5 tracks are in the same situation currently. I think you can all understand how big of a deal this is just by imagining it happening to one (or six) of your tracks!

The response I received was:

*** "Rest assured, when typing the name of the track and changing the media type to music, your track does appear in search results. I have attached a screenshot displaying this (Except the screenshot she provided wasn't even my track!!)

We really wish there was more we could do for you with regards ranking. While I understand the significance of this to you, as far as I am aware there is unfortunately not much more that can be done. However, I am happy to escalate this case to my manager and see if any resolution is possible." ***

This was 24 hours ago, and still nothing. I've always loved this site and been very supportive of everything about it, but this seems very unprofessional and concerning to me. Soundcloud has this functionality, so does AJ, and other sites. How could something as simple as updating a wav file throw everything into a tailspin? And more importantly, why didn't they tell me that this was a risk?

Has this ever happened to anyone else before? I'm curious about how many people have updated their files successfully.

Thanks for reading.

Aww man, I'm really sorry to hear this :( I hope they bounce back up to where they belong. I can't imagine how frustrating this must be. The back-end to this site must be really poorly designed if they can't manually go in and re-adjust the ranking of a track for an individual specific search term especially since you have proof. I had a similar experience (not this severe) when they had that bug with the tags being deleted for a relatively popular track of mine. I asked if the tags could be brought back (as I couldn't remember all 50 for that specific track) but this was not possible and I haven't had a sale on that track since. I'm surprised nothing is archived. I really like this site too but the architecture under the hood is clearly outdated and only aesthetic changes seem to be made.

Hope this gets resolved for you!

Had it happen to me once a few years back where i decided to "refresh" a then best selling clip of mine -that i wasnt very happy with in regards to image quality- with a better version without noise and a few other color enhancements.
Of course i lost all stats (i was told it would happen) ,bit i never saw that clip sell again, a "side effect" i wasnt told about.
Chances are they didnt know either.
If something works DONT touch it better upload a new version with the same name,tags etc and/or delete the old clip.

I had the same thing happen a few years ago - I had 2 versions of the same file (One was 1080 and the other was 720) - I emailed asking to link them, and sure enough they did (this is before auto downsizing) - but it lost its place in the search engine. Barely ever sold again. Just don't do it.

I was contacted yesterday by support and they said they're sending in reinforcements to see if a solution is possible. Seems they have been able to bring the old version of one of the tracks back which shows the correct revenue but shows 0 views, alongside with the new version which shows the correct views but 0 revenue. It'd be nice if they could marry the two together. I'll keep you updated, but just DO NOT UPDATE ANYTHING.

Thanks for posting this, I do video not music but I'm sure the same rules apply. In come cases I will still make corrections to obvious mistakes but I better abandon plans to update all my files/titles/keywords.

I have updated quite a few in the last week and last night I went looking for them and could not find ONE so basically any updating or corrections drops you to the bottom of the search ranking then and today that's HUGE because the pool is near 7 million files.....good luck ever having that file rise again.

This should be in the FAQ, wonder how many people update files and unknowingly sink them.

Thanks again for posting that.

wait, so even small updates like replacing tags and modifying description text messes up your item's search rank?

wow...

@paulorego I can't say for sure but that's what I'm gathering from TuneLight's post. Have to be careful and get the facts because if this is the case then making changes could send files all the way back down the ladder and have to claw their way back up again.

Once I read that post I immediately stopped the mass updating of my files, doing smaller test batches now and being very careful as mistakes can be costly.

I update keywords after each sale. Sure hope this is not the reason for no growth in sales and a reduction in many cases.

P5 guys, will changing keywords, price, description, thumb make any changes in search results?

did u replace them the proper way? (sending the new tracks by email to staff, indicating the id's of the ones that need to be replaced with the attached ones and letting them doing the actual replacing) or did you just delete them yourself, upload the new stuff and only after that sent the email?...