On making music buying as easy as royalty-free


Kelly Thompson, Chief Operating Officer, iStockphoto

How does iStockphoto’s new audio site differ from others in the market?
We’re one of the first companies who are actually selling royalty-free audio. Audio’s kind of a different animal than selling video and photos. There are a lot more restrictions of course with the recording associations and with how members of those organizations are paid for public performances. It gets very complicated very quickly. So, on our standard offering, what we’ve decided to do is not allow people who are members of Pro organizations to submit to us. If you belong to one of those bodies, you cannot submit to iStock. Instead, we’re pushing those people to our sister site which is Pump audio and they have the mechanisms to deal with the more complex issues involved in that. So, for us, we’re looking for those people who are not members of Pro organizations and that way we can sell actual royalty-free music that you don’t have to worry about rights when doing a public performance or any of that kind of complexity. Most other sites that claim they’re royalty-free actually aren’t because you do often still have to pay public performance royalties on the kinds of things that you’re buying.

So, absolutely no restrictions…
Right, on standard audio. Now, things have been going well with the standard audio collection. Of course, we’ve only been selling for a little over a month now. What’s been happening behind the scenes is that we’ve taken a selection of the PUMp collection and we’re actually going to put it onto iStock as well. So we will have both royalty-free music and the single use tracks from Pump audio available on the site.

To sum up, on the Pump tracks, you will possilbly have to pay performance royalties on those and they are single-use.

How’s the pricing compare?
Our standard pricing is $2, $5, $15 and $25. And, the pump audio tracks begin at $29. The pump audio tracks are mostly full-length songs from Indie artists. You can imagine when we first announced that iStock was doing audio, there were a lot of members of Prop organizations who were frustrated they couldn’t submit to us, so this is sort of the best of both worlds: you submit through pump and then we’ll sell it through our site and Pump deals with the collection of royalties and those kinds of things.

How do these two categories appear differently?
You can either have them appear together, but they’re marked slightly differently, there’s a single note, an eighth note next to the more expensive audio when you’re doing the search so you can instantly see which one’s which. And we obviously know it can be confusing to users, so we’re very clear: by a Pump image it will actually say, “You may have to pay a performance fee.”
Who’s providing the royalty-free tracks for the most part?
Honestly, almost no one at this point provides entirely royalty-free music at this point. When we started to look around, it was surprising almost no one did. This is one of the first offerings to provide truly royalty-free.

How was it finding artists?
It wasn’t actually hard to do at all. I think, like photographers, there are a lot of closet musicians out there. And, we’d had really great success with our video collection—we had tons of videographers on our site who—most videographers need stills as well—were buying stills and as soon as we launched a video collection, they started uploading. As soon as the video site kicked off, we had all these people going, well you know, I have all this great royalty-free video and images, so now I need sound effects and loops to go with those other elements, so it was a nice natural progression. And a lot of times a lot of the same people doing video are also doing audio. I guess a little more surprisingly, a lot of our top photographers also were audio guys. Yeah, it’s worked out well.

You actually became a multi-media swapping community.
Yes, that’s especially true in video and we’re anticipating will become so in audio. We knew there was a big audience who wanted video and as soon as they started buying it, we said to them, look, for those of you who’ve probably been shooting for years, you probably have a lot of stuff sitting on the shelf that was done for customers that was never used. Cut out the best stuff, cut it into 30 s chunks, a decent-sized clip, and upload it. They were pretty astounded at how well it sold. So, it’s worked well.

Since, I think some people reading will be interested in submitting as well as buying, are there certain areas you’re looking for, for instance certain formats or certain subject matter?
The good news is in audio and video, the collections are still really young, so we need everything. On the photo side, we have 4.5 million images so the competition is a lot tighter over there. And, we have most things covered but yeah, audio is wide open. We’re starting with about 10,000 of the royalty-free tracks and when the pump collection launches, there’ll be about 15,000 of those. So, 25,000 tracks all together, which is a pretty decent-sized music collection, but it’s wide open for submissions.

Can you describe the procedure for submitting tracks?
What happens when you want to submit. You come to the site. We take you through some training—if you’re a videographer it’s great, but if you’ve never sold royalty-free work, there are a few rules and legal procedures you have to be aware of. We give you a quiz post-training. Then you upload a couple samples of whatever file type you’re applying for. Our inspectors take a look at those and once they’re happy, they give the thumbs-up and you can immediately start uploading. It is really addicting for our photographers, because as they’re images are sold they get paid in real time, so the balance up at the top keeps refreshing. We sell an image every second, so you can imagine that people’s accounts

Our top contributors are making a lot of money. Everyone out there trying to make it, should try to do a little something like this on the side. You probably have some extra audio footage. Our chief video officier says that it’s the perfect recycling job because you have material you can’t use, you can upload and make some money from the residual leftovers. It recession-proofs you in some ways too.

What formats do you offer audio in?
They’re standard WAV files, standard across the board. Our previews are done in flash because it’s an easy standard to work with.