iStockphoto Adds Audio
May 15th, 2008 by Lee Torrens
In a first for an established microstock agency, industry leader iStockphoto has announced their intentions to do for audio what they did for stock photos, illustrations and video. That is, sell lots of it.
Starting immediately, “iStockaudio” are now accepting submissions from “musicians, composers, recording engineers and audio artists”, seeking “music, spoken word tracks, sound effects, ambient loops, wild noises, field recordings”. The launch comes complete with a new audio homepage, an audio tutorial, audio application process and separate audio forum. It also follows the existing iStockphoto exclusivity model with commission rates scaled from 20 - 40% depending on canister level. Prices range from 1 to 25 credits depending on the type and complexity of the submission.
Daryl Lang has a great writeup of the announcement over at PDN in the context of the microstock market including the complexities of selling music with Royalty Free licenses.
The full press release is available for download from iStockphoto’s press page.
Update 2008-05-15: I neglected to mention Jupiter are already in this space with estockmusic.com and while not integrated into StockXpert, it is microstock for audio in all other ways.
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Tags: iStockphoto, Microstock, News
This is pretty awesome, can’t wait to see how well they do with this as a business model.
Doesn’t Creative Commons already have a big audio market, will this mean less contributions under CC?
I don’t follow the audio market so I’m not sure, but I think it’s a safe assumption that every opportunity for people to monetize their audio would reduce the quantity available with CC.
-Lee