Music
Shutterstock has announced the buyout of AI-driven music platform
Amper Music for an undisclosed sum. The move adds to a growing trend of stock image sites getting involved in rights-free music. Earlier this year, Adobe
inked a deal to carry rights-free music catalogs from both Epidemic Sound and Jamendo, while Getty Images also hosts a royalty-free music library by
Epidemic Sound.
Shutterstock says it is excited to announce a new
annual music subscription for only
$199 per-year or $16.60 per-month. This subscription gives the user the freedom to download as many tracks as needed, whenever they need them, for one low yearly price. Those interested may visit the
pricing page to start their subscription.
Image creators need better information about the kind of content that is selling. Are customers looking at higher priced content? Can creators earn more money if their images are in a collection like Offset where images are licensed for much higher prices? Should creators produce more stills? Should they buy new equipment and start shooting video that sells for higher prices? Shutterstock’s
quarterly reports to investors aren’t very helpful in this regard.
Storyblocks, formerly Videoblocks will generate about $30 million from licensing stock imagery in 2017. Currently, they have a little over 200,000 subscription customers who pay $149 a year for unlimited access to about 115,000 video clips. They also offer about 200,000 photos, 200,000 vectors and other illustrations and 100,000 pieces of music for a separate subscription price.
There is a new website called
TopImageSites that, in theory, will help customers find “The Best Stock Images On The Web.” Ten agencies are listed and the number of “products” available in each agency’s collection are listed in the chart below. Products include: photos, vectors, illustration, videos and audio files. Some of the agencies don’t have audio files and Panthermedia doesn’t have either video or audio.
Pond5, the world’s largest provider of royalty-free stock videos, music tracks and sound effects, as well as millions of photos, has announced the appointment of
Jason Teichman as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer and Board Director. In this role, Teichman will help the company continue to accelerate its growth by scaling its creative marketplace, leveraging its unique relationship with the artist community, and furthering its investments in emerging media such as drone footage and 360-degree video.
The annual
FOCAL International Awards Ceremony will be held on May 26, 2016 and the day before on May 25th the
footageMarketplace will be held at 195 Piccadilly (home of BAFTA) in London. At this event footage and music content buyers can meet with 35 of the world’s premier footage/production music libraries.
Dreamstime has enhanced the already prolific stock media catalog of 43 million images and is now accepting submissions to build a library of royalty-free audio clips. In the first 24 hours after opening the site for submissions Dreamstime received more than 10,000 sound clips. The new audio section will eventually contain thousands of high quality professionally produced sound effects and music files, not currently found anywhere else in the industry. The royalty-free audio clips are grouped into four categories which include instrumental, style, theme, and sound effects, with many sub-categories available for further refining, ensuring users can quickly find the exact sounds or music their projects require.
CueSongs today announces the appointment of Luke Vines as Chief Operating Officer. Vines will begin the role with immediate effect, reporting directly into Christina Vaughan, CEO of CueSongs.
CueSongs, the one-stop music licensing hub for online and digital media, is delighted to announce Christina Vaughan is taking up the position of CEO from the 1st of February. Christina will remain as Chairman of
Image Source but will relinquish day to day operations of the business to Anthony Harris, who becomes Image Source’s CEO.
VideoBlocks.com, the first subscription-based provider of unlimited royalty-free stock video, has launched its third content platform, AudioBlocks.com. At $99 per year,
AudioBlocks is the only subscription service to offer unlimited downloads of over 100,000 high-quality, royalty-free music tracks, sound effects and loops.
CueSongs, the one-stop music licensing hub for online and digital media, achieves yet another strategic partnership announcing it has reached an agreement to become the exclusive music partner of Image Source, the leading independent image agency, to power its new music licensing service unveiled today.
A reader wrote "Strikes me that there is so much fragmentation in the stock image space it’s hard for anyone, especially the photographers, to make money." He thinks we need a better way for people to search and license images. See my comments. Let me know if you have other ideas.
Getty Images has partnered with
SoundCloud Music in a deal similar to the one they have with Flickr. The more than 20 million registered users of SoundCloud can make their original content available for licensing simply by adding the Getty “license” button to their SoundCloud player.