Does cheaper mean more sales?

Maybe but the simple fact is the artists making the most profit / commissions here do not price lower to make sales. They start higher and stay higher.

Right now, I'm in the "Why that one?" mode. I'm having sales, but I'm completely baffled at what people are selecting to pay $40 dollars for.

Take, for instance, this one, which sold recently for $40: http://www.pond5.com/stock-music/41841097

Did they really pay $40 for that? It's literally one and a half minutes of just stabs and short musical passages. I've much longer and better stuff you could have bought.

Why you are unhappy with customer who bought your shorter audio?
Why $40- is too much for this customer? May be they just have big budget and want to spend the money they got from their customer. Their customer will complain if they buy cheapy audio for their big budget project.
Hope that help you clear your mind. ;)
People bought my birds footage for 299 or 399. ;)

I've said it before in other threads but maybe it applies somewhat to here. For those who feel low prices will help. A couple months ago I sold a single photo to a large oil company through another agency for over $34,000 ... yes $34K. I never in my wildest dream thought that would happen. It was from an old 8 mp Canon 20D and a JPG at that and had never sold in almost 8 years. It was just the one they wanted and needed for a project. Yes I did give them 5 years exclusive.

So I can see thousands or millions of photos here on P5 with higher quality. So a photo that might be listed here for $20 would take 1,700 plus sales, at $5 like most photos it would have taken nearly 7,000 sales .... that will just will not happen. It shows that buyers are looking for not just quality but subject. It was not all that unusual but it did have a setting that few other photos have. That was enough to send it over the edge. Can that apply to music or footage, yes I believe so but not if you copy others or make the same sound over and over with slight variations. Be original!

So the moral, just because something does not sell for a few years is no reason to lower prices in the belief it will sell better.

How often you need to sell your bird footage to make $299-399 when you sell your bird footage for $10 or 20 ? And do you think you can sell 10-20 times of your birds ?

It is unlikely one footage will sell 100 times (very seldom, may be one or two).

In photo stock, customers download pictures ($1) like crazy, one picture DL for 1000 - 10,000 times are quite normal (contributors made 20% on photo), but footage is really different game than photo.

I am comfortable with my less sale and high price. ;)

i for one need the money from a month to month basis, so i cant just wait for years hoping that a track will sell for $300. its just too pressuring psychologically. seeing the p5 email in the morning telling me i had a sale really does make me feel better and start working or something. but seeing no such mail for weeks is making me think i suck and the work is maybe not worth it. so having sales motivates me, even if they are lower price. now, of course, low or high is pretty relative, some might think $5 for music was low, i thought $15 was. some might think $30 is high, i think $90 is. i guess you have to choose whether you need the money at the end of the month or do you just do it for fun and have a nother job in the meantime that pays so that u dont rely on the rf sites money. i for one rely on them, and its disappointing raising prices (as i did some times in the past) and seeing no better results. i had music at $90 and only sold one clip in a whole month, and it was a damn ukulele track dammit :| so this is the kind of original stuff clients look for when paying the bigger bucks? ukulele shit? :| anyway...its been 11 days since my last payout and i only made 5 bucks, with a 600 clips portfolio. last year with 200 clips i made more, its so annoying some times, just drives you out of the will to work.........

Pricing too low hurts everyone and devalues your music at the same time. Please, don't give your stuff away! But at the same time, it's a bit lofty to think you can charge more than the "big boy" libraries and expect people to take that seriously.

I think having consistent pricing is the most important thing. If you have something for $5 here and $50 somewhere else, a person who goes to both sites and finds you is going to license from the lower fee site. If they don't have a choice other than $50, that's what they pay to use your music. If fees on a site are too low, I'm not going to sell there. I have everything that's posted here pending posting on a site with better traffic and established fees they set at a much higher rate than what I'm charging now. Once they go live, the fees here and everywhere else will change to match and those will be the fees.

One question is: Do a customer compare price of your music in different online agencies? It will cost them lot of time (means money). Only small production house do so (?). When small production house looks for cheapy music, they can use price filter.

So I don't think you should worry about that. For a customer, they look for what they need, and what budget they have. That is it.

IMO

AAMediaMusic, what is that site you mentioned that has better traffic than p5??

LivingroomClassics - I'm sorry, but I don't think it would be fair to Pond5 to mention the other site by name since we're on Pond5's site. All I can say here is that they are also a media asset marketplace and it is not AudioJungle. Visit my website from the link on my artist page and you can contact me directly for the answer.

Patuwe97 - Some of us sell on multiple sites, not just one. If you're selling for $50 on site X and $25 on Y, and I typically use both sites, I'm going to buy the song from Y. Most companies search multiple music sites and some do compare and shop around for a lower price on a song if it fits their need and it's pushing the budget. The kind of companies that use sites at this level have small budgets. All they have to do is visit some other sites they use and type your name as an artist, then look for the song. It's really easy for music because the composer names are usually a searchable field. That's not much time at all.

** Basically, market saturation and underselling are killing this industry.