Monthly Archives: March 2008

The power of the Wiki and the goal of AudioMicro

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I colleague of AudioMicro’s was kind enough to share with us the article found here —>

http://www.wikinomics.com/the-wikinomics-playbook-2008.pdf

This profound, collaboratively written article reinforces the founding principles of AudioMicro and it’s user generated content licensing platform for licensing stock music, stock sound effects, and royalty-free music for commercial reproduction though a member generated and member policed (edited/reviewed) platform. The team here at AudioMicro recommends that all users give a good solid read to the article, as their are some important takeaways and corollaries to what we do here at AudioMicro and what we are working so hard to build. The goal of our efforts is to ensure that ARTISTS TO GET PAID FOR THEIR CONTENT. We want you to be able to monetize those assets that you have created rather than give them all away and share them all for free. Therefore, we are creating this platform with the artist’s mind at heart, in hopes that we can foster an atmosphere that encourages you to continue to create work and enjoy a lifetime of artistic enjoyment and fulfillment. This is our goal.

The present state of the high end commercial music licensing market

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According to 2006 Enders analysis and Wall Street research, the commercial music licensing market is about or in excess of $3 billion – Three Billion Dollars! That’s a huge market in need of some serious consolidation. Right now, at the high end of the market, we are seeing companies with premium priced content licensing out top quality, highly produced tracks using traditional sales reps. In addition, we are seeing disparate, wholly owned and traditional content aggregators licensing royalty free tracks and CD’s for middle tier rates. One funny thing to note about these libraries is that they want their artists to send them CD-rom’s (WTF?) containing their music and sound effects portfolios to that they can review them and determine whether or not to accept the content. The artist actually have to burn CD’s and DVD’s and snail mail their portfolios to some snooty editor for review. How is it possible that we are still mailing CD’s and DVD’s with digital content? The rhetorical questions points to the fact that if your distributor wants you to send them a CD, then they are just not on top of what’s happening in the digital world. If they have no web presence, and have no idea what FTP means, then you should run far away from them and disengage yourself from any contractual obligations you may have, because their lack of technological knowledge speaks volumes about the existence of their business (and your ability to get a royalty check – sending hard copy checks is another dumb process to be addresses in a later post). It basically means that any income stream you may presently be obtaining from them, or that you expect to obtain from them in the future, will shrink, and ultimately die. These high end and middle tier royalty-free licensors have no permanent place in the crowd sourced, micro stock world. In the end, they will adapt or be forced to go out of business. A few of the high end libraries will survive, but everything in between high end and micro stock will ultimately perish.

Navigating the Music Micro Payment Environment

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Micro Stock, also known as micro payment, is a concept new to musicians, audio engineers, and sounds effects engineers, as it is commonly used in the photography industry.? A common misconception about micro payment is that the quality of the music is somehow inferior to traditional rights managed music.? The idea that micro stock music is of an inferior quality is totally incorrect.? In fact, a great deal of the content found on micro stock audio and micro stock music sites is superior to the tracks found on high end licensor’s, it’s just that the content comes from un-signed and artists that choose to purposefully bypass the record labels and better maintain control of their content and rights.? AudioMicro allows its artists to maintain exclusive copyright ownership in their content.? The only rights that are given to AudioMicro are the non-exclusive right to license this content, in exchange for a healthy royalty share of 50%.? The artists can revoke his / her content from the site at any time (perhaps after striking a deal with a major), so there is really zero risk on behalf of the artists.? What many folks don’t realize is that, in the micro stock photography realm, there are many artists making well over $100,000 per year selling their content strictly on micro stock websites.? We feel that this handsome annual income is easily attainable for micro stock music licensees as more and more big advertising clients turn away from traditional, high priced, rights managed licensing and begin to adopt micro stock music and micro stock audio and the preferred method of licensing audio content for commercial and editorial use.

Introduction to Selling Stock

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For those of you not familiar with the notion of selling stock music and selling stock audio, the folks here at Audio Micro would like to introduce you to this novel concept and help you monetize the digital assets you have created that are sitting on your hard drive, collecting dust, or should be say, taking of space / bytes.

First of all, anyone can upload and contribute to our archive, free of charge.? All you have to do is create sounds, beats, audio clips, sound effects, music and any other audio intellectual property that you own copyright to or are the original author of.? Once you have created the content, just sign up for a free account and upload your tracks.? The editors here are Audio Micro will review your submission for quality and post all of your acceptable files to our archive, which is available to stock music and stock audio buyers around the glove, 24 / 7 / 365.

When a clip from your account is licensed by a customers, you receive a royalty on this download, as typically 50% of the sales price.? Should you desire to assist Audio Micro in the editing / review process, we will grant you one free download credit for every clip you review, regardless of whether or not you accept or reject the clip.? The goal here is to maintain a high quality standard for our buyers while simultaneously ensuring that enough solid, licensable content makes it’s way into our archive.? It takes a certain degree of professional music judgment, but if you are an audio enthusiast, you should be able to pickup the editing process and get an idea for the type of content that’s acceptable, in no time.

We’re hopeful that you find this introductory post meaningful.? We will provide more tips as well as upload suggestions in future posts.

Welcome to the AudioMicro blog

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Welcome to AudioMicro and thank you for joining our community. You have made a great decision to become part of a revolutionary group of audio enthusiasts who desire to monetize their personal collections of stock audio clips, sound bites, sound effects, and music loops. At www.audiomicro.com you can buy stock audio, sell stock audio, buy sound bites, sell sound bites, buy audio clips, sell audio clips, buy sound effects, sell sound effect, buy music loops, and sell music loops. All content on www.audiomicro.com sells for as little as $1 per clip and all content comes with the proper rights and clearences to ensure that you can reuse the content in any legal commercial manner under the sun, free of additional royalty obligations.

AudioMicro was designed with one goal in mind: for artist to get paid for their work.? We are strong supported of the open source movement, yet we believe that content creators should be compensated for their works and not just give their hard earned work away for others to use and ultimately profit from.? We believe that if you create and license content, you should be compensated for that content with a royalty and all royalties and licenses should be transparent and reported to the artist, preferably in a monthly manner. ? That’s the goal here are AudioMicro – for you to receive a monthly royalty payment for the stock audio, stock sound bites, and stock music that you contribute and license to other members of the AudioMicro community.? We hope you enjoy the community we are creating here at AudioMicro and feel free to reach out to us with any questions or concerns you may have.? We are here to help.