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Thank you, Art. 15% seems fair.

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Thank you for the reply Art.

Different question…

With respect to one’s PRO, what percent commission do they take on the royalties? PROs don’t really have membership dues, so I don’t understand how they earn enough money to exist if they’re not taking a commission on the royalties. But if I am getting 50% of publishing, and the library is getting 50% publishing, and I am getting 100% of writing…then where does the PRO take its own cut?

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Pat said,

It says,”You can refer your friends to Pond5 and earn 5% on all their “purchases” within their first year of signing up.

Yeah, it is kind of confusing. But I think it is both 5% of purchases and 5% of sales.

See this:

There is also a very interesting referral program, which grants a 5% commissions on the sales of the referred contributors or on the purchases of the referred customer for one year.

Source:

http://www.marcorstock.com/en/pond5-review/

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I do not know why you are on this discussion board if you do not want to discuss.

I apologize if my posts come across as hostile. I really am trying to understand the business model better.

I just feel as though composers, who put so much effort into their craft, are sometimes taken advantage of.

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Pond5 even has the audacity to boast about the 50% royalty rate that composers receive as if it is so lucrative (“several times higher than the industry standard”):

Apparently, Pond5 needs to pay their copyeditor a higher rate as well, as I have never heard of a “royality” rate.

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MichaelL said,

Your argument is based on the incorrect assumption that these sites somehow run on autopilot at little or no expense, as well as comparing apples to oranges, re Etsy and ebay.

I am still waiting for someone to tell me what these sites are doing for composers. You’ve twice mentioned how I am mistaken without actually providing any details to correct me.

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BrianDWatson said,

Additionally, the 50/50 is just industry standard,

Exactly. This is my point. 50/50 is the standard across the board—from an RF library that does nothing but host your music to a boutique library that is regularly pitching and selling your music. There should be a wider spectrum of commissions to reflect the services that a library is willing to provide for the composer.

BrianDWatson said,

Also Etsy and Ebay don’t feel like similar enough sites to make a comparison, since you can license a song unlimited times where as I can only sell my one of a kind KISS doll once.

Fair point.

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MichaelL said,

I would actually say that you are seriously underestimating how much work it takes and what it costs run an online library.

BrianDWatson said,

Besides the overhead, they also do all the legwork of pitching and have connections most of us don’t.

Clearly, I am missing something. Can you please enlighten me?

As I said in my original post, I am not referring to the high-end libraries; I am referring to lower level libraries, such as Pond5 or Getty/Pump Audio. These sites certainty are not “pitching my music” or providing valuable connections. They simply host my music and provide the infrastructure of an online marketplace—just like a site like ebay (who takes 10%), Etsy (who takes 4%), or Airbnb (who takes 15%).

I am not questioning the revenue split of the boutique or high-end libraries. I believe these libraries are actually bringing value — they give the composer real connections (not just a search engine) and may even have real humans corresponding with music supervisors to “sell” your music. That is providing a real service.

Is it not strange that a lower-tier library and a higher-tier library almost take the same cut, when one of them does not do much on behalf of the composer?

Tbone said,

If it’s so easy to sell the music then why don’t composers do it themselves?

Because composers are composers. Composers are not web developers, or entrepreneurs, or music executives. They want to write music, not write code, not write contracts, and not write emails. I am not saying that libraries shouldn’t take anything—of course they deserve their cut and we as composers understand how the relationship works. At some point, however, the cut grows to the point of near-exploitation. When a library takes 75% of the sync fees over the $1,000 per track mark, and 100% of the sync fees under the $1,000 per track mark…I’m sorry, but, to me, this just seems exploitative.

Tbone said,

I would suggest trying to do it yourself to get a better understanding of why it’s so hard to become a successful music library.

It’s hard to become a successful music library not because it is so expensive to create and run a library website, but because the market is very competitive. As MLR’s existence proves, there are a glut of music libraries out there, with no library taking a majority of the pie. There is no market leader, only market leaders. Many of the libraries are relatively homogenous, and they do not successfully differentiate themselves from competing libraries. But are the costs associated with running an online music library really three times larger than running an operation like Airbnb or Etsy?

Tbone said,

I’ve always considered 50/50 fair to be honest.

We consider it fair because that’s all we’ve ever known. But when comparing the online production music marketplace to the online marketplaces of any other industry, it is clear that the commissions that music libraries take are uniquely exorbitant. I welcome counterexamples.

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Thank you Kubed for the clarification.

But isn’t that a little extreme? That you can NEVER remove your track from the AudioSparx library? It’s a big turn off. Or is this kind of stipulation par for the course nowadays?

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