pond5 now takes 65% of sales?

@RonKujawaMusic It's great that you did and also great to see some people are being pragmatic here.! And I wouldn't have expected any other answer than that by them, obviously.
But there are thousands of producers here, and if (yes, it will never happen..) at least most of them contacted them directly, things might look a little different. Even if they are "video-centric", they can't afford losing that many contributors or clients, if all of them raised their prices significantly.
I was being provocative. But still, many apparently behave like victims, otherwise the market wouldn't be what it is.
Licensing is my full-time job. I'm quite new to the whole RF thing though, and I saw it as a great addition, since you can basically write whatever you want, whenever you want. And yes, you're totally right - the direction people are going is making it pretty much impossible.
And I wholeheartedly agree about trust.....

Yes, doing it yourself is a lot of work, especially to get started, but in my opinion for most people with a big enough portfolio it's worth it.
You don't need SourceAudio for that, or any of their competitors. Learn wordpress and woocommerce, that's a matter of 2 weeks or so if you have no experience with stuff like that, and there are countless tutorials out there. Invest another month or so in learning the basics of Google Ads etc. Needless to say, there is a lot more to it, and it IS work. But it's (almost) a walk in the park for anyone able to produce music.
And outside the whole RF world - there are tons of people out there who pay actual money for good music on a daily basis..

@RonKujawaMusic Beatstars does allow you to upload stock music and not just beats for rappers, but they don't promote that side of the business. The site I was referring to would be geared directly for stock music clientele.

Here's the link to that conversation: https://musiclibraryreport.com/forums/topic/direct-licensing-2/#post-32914

I'm soooooo glad i didn't waste my time uploading the rest of my portfolio (some 100+ tracks!) - saved myself time and disappointment in one fell swoop!

How much do you value the time it took you to compose your music? From coming up with the initial idea to actual production and post production? The amount of time it took you to upload your music, set all your keywords 'correctly' and set a price you believed was competitive? To promote said music on other platforms to drive traffic? And now they're setting in place a 65/35 split in their favour??? Hell no!!!

If this is the route P5 is going down it'll only be a matter of time before you see 70/30, 80/20, 90/10 splits. I would rather, and will, set up my own site charging competitive prices and receiving 100% of the revenue.

I'm actually really glad they've done this as it's made me reassess my worth in this industry.

Hasta la vista P5 and this community - it was a blast while it lasted.

Good luck with selling yourself but you won't get the traffic as an individual that you get at agencies.

@Marbury - We'll see...

There will be also another bad impact on P5. Those authors that were promoting their music on P5 because it was profitable for them now have no advantages. So now, they will be promoting all other marketplaces equally because "author share" now the same elsewhere.

And I know a lot of authors were promoting pond5 links only. It will change now.

Guys, forget about raising prices. They now have "Best Price Guarantee" deal here on Pond5. Check this link - https://help.pond5.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029928151

@Epikton - That is why over the next several months I'll be removing certain items from here. I'll also be raising prices for certain items on all the marketplaces where I have them. Unfortunately, I can't touch my very best sellers here because I'd lose position in search results. But I'll do what I can.

Here is my very biased prediction/hope...

A lot of guys in the middle making part time income at P5 pull our tracks, reducing the amount of available music for customers.

Some will raise prices hoping to recoup income, but the higher prices will result in fewer sales.

P5 music customers end up with higher prices and less selection of quality music. Content creators on the low end will continue to supply music and at bottom dollar prices, but the music will be sub-par. This sub-par music will be fine for some costumers, but others will go shopping at other sites.

P5 eventually goes to a subscription model in their race to the bottom, causing an even great hit to content creators, which will likely result in more music getting pulled and the downward spiral to continue.

The RF stock music continues a race to the bottom until almost no composers can justify the amount of work they're doing for next to nothing coming back. Composers who have had enough of the race to the bottom pull their music from the established RF stock music sites and aim at higher-end libraries. This works for some, but there is an underserved market for YouTubers, corporate, ads, wedding videos, etc. They are stuck with whatever music is left in the RF stock music sites, which aren't being fed with fresh material anymore.

Hopefully, a new business model for RF stock music begins to compete with the established sites that presently act sort of like Publishers and take 50% or more of license fees, but don't do any of the traditional work a Publisher does. This new business model allows composers to host their music in a common marketplace for a fair service fee, and they get to determine what they charge clients (with a minimum set by the community of composers), and they keep 100% of the license fee, and since they are composer and acting as Publisher, they keep all PRO ownership and resulting royalty revenue. If this new model began to gain any traction at all, the full-time composers at the established RF stock music sites would begin to participate as well, and likely slowly migrate everything to the new model. As the established RF sites diminished, as did their catalogs, the customers would also migrate to the new model. And since many of the customers are content creators themselves, they would not only understand the concept of fair compensation for the composers, they would actually support the concept.

I realize it's wishful thinking, but stranger things have happened. Time will tell.

222485 => gdpr