New Subscription plan: how does it impact composers?

It's unclear from the marketing material whether we will take a hit or not. If someone downloads one of our songs through a subscription, do we get paid full price for our cues or, is it a reduced rate?

I would also like to know

10 downloads for $25 so we would get $2.50 a download.

That's not correct. You would get $0.875 Your 35% of $2.50

35% of $2.50, so 87 cents per download.

Plus, subscribers can rollover their downloads if they don’t use them.

Plus, they can buy a yearly subscription which means the amount contributors earns is even less - 44 cents per download.

This is bad, bad news. Pretty much the end of Pond5 providing an income via upfront sales.

I have the same question:
Until now we had the freedom to to set our own price for our tracks, for example I set the price higher for very elaborately produced soundtracks. Are we now forced to sell them for $2.50?

Our tracks will still be on sale at their normal price at the same time as being available through subscription. Which allows Pond5 to say 'nothing has changed'.

In my experience with other marketplaces that have taken this route, it doesn't take long for subscriptions to start cannibalising regular sales. Why wouldn't they, users can get ten (or more if they roll over) music items for less than the price of one.

Even worse, subscription don't take into account the instrumentation, quality, or length of a music track. They're all the same, very, very low price.

If users also go for the Music & SFX package, a 3 minute music track will earn the same 87 cent commission as a 5 second sound effect.

I haven't been able to find out if they're still going to be collecting royalties on behalf of PRO members or not.

So, from now on the highest price for a normal sale can be 25$, because no one will pay more if you get further 9 for the same price. So I guess most customers will go to subscrition for one month...

As composer I have to ask myself: Do I want to give away my "bigger" scores and songwriter songs with vocals for the 87 cent I get? If not, then I have to take them down.

I thinks pond5 will now hardly get more contributions with production quality. And because music current trends matter a lot, the catalogue of music on pond5 will get outdated soon. It`s all about quantity, not quality.

Been there, done that. This is something I posted a few years back, things are actually worse now. This was based on a 50% commission, Pond5's commission is lower of course. My experiment was with an unlimited download model but the earnings will generally be the same or worse at a lower commission rate. This will also answer the " sales by volume " theory. This will give you all a general idea. Regardless, one's earnings will be a tiny fraction of the actual value of your product.

I wanted to experiment with the subscription model just to find out for myself exactly what I would encounter. I read the pros and cons about it all but I wanted to find out for myself. This post is geared for all of you who are curious about and considering the subscription thing. It’s based upon one site with about the typical rate of a monthly subscription fee. it’s as bad and even worse than I read or thought it would be. Now I know !!! Here’s the numbers. I had 69 files downloaded, a combination of full tracks, loops and stingers. The total value of those files would be about between 1,500.00 – 1,700 dollars, my 50% cut would be around 800 dollars under normal single track licensing. I was paid a grand total of 14 dollars and some cents !!! So there you have it, my personal experience, real numbers. I must point out that it was under their early bird subscription price but even under their pending regular subscription pricing I still would have made under 20 dollars. So for all of you who are considering the subscription model, especially you young composers, this is what you’re looking at. What a shame that this is actually happening and becoming more common.

There simply is NO PRO for the composer with the subscription model if the subscription prices are ridiculously low. It's evident given it's simple maths ;) The trend is: I'll give you more and more for less and less. What could possibly go wrong?

Do you see other real-world industries doing this? No. Retainers are basically subscriptions for lawyers. Are they low and can you just ask them to do anything you want 24/7 for a few bucks a month? Good luck with that. Do hotels rent their rooms for peanuts. Hell, no way. A LIMITED discount in exchange for continuous work and/or high volumes is a reasonable business practice, and it's voluntary. The all-you-can-eat mentality for pennies is an infallable recipe for disaster. The subscribers sooner or later will find better ways, given there is no lack of FREE content, and that content is not that bad, sometimes it's even quite good. Or even right now, they can subscribe for 2 or 3 months, download the crap out of P5's catalogue, and call it a day.
Content providers like us will have to give up doing this because it makes no financial sense. Energy prices are going up everywhere in the world, which means it's bad for us but also for these platforms - you don't run servers on the holy spirit ;) We leave, subs leave... bye bye. It won't happen overnight but this is killing entire industries. Add to this the progress AI-produced content is experiencing, and the future does not look bright at all.