At the SXSW Music Festival, the people from Getty Images-owned iStockphoto (where they must be kicking themselves for making that name such a familiar brand on the web now that they’re about much more than photos) will be formally launching the most recent addition to its network today, with a collection of 30,000 royalty-free and single-production audio tracks unsurprisingly dubbed iStockaudio. This was actually partly (and unwillingly) announced early last month, but has now expanded into a much more robust audio-licensing offering.
iStock’s Standard Audio collection now includes more than 11,000 royalty-free, user-generated sound effects and music tracks from 500+ artists along with a fresh Pump Audio collection of over 18,000 single-production music tracks. Pricing hasn’t changed since its launch: royalty-free tracks still start at $2 each with Pump Audio tracks going from $29.
For context: you may remember indie music agent Pump Audio was sold to Getty Images in June 2007, and the latter subsequently started selling music tracks under a different brand name (Soundtrack) a couple of months later.
Anyway, iStock is now touting itself as the “first company to offer stock imagery, video footage, vector illustrations, Flash files and audio for purchase under a single payment model, on one site”.
Since we can’t think of any others off the top of our heads, we guess that’s right. It will be interesting to look back at actual audio sales at next year’s SXSW festival, so we’re hoping the company will share revenue and growth numbers then.
I believe you are correct in regards to all of the file types.
It would be good information for the industry to get more transparency on micro-fee based services like iTunes.
Ultimately, it may make more sense to yield $1 on 1% of visitors; versus ads where we yield 0.0001% per visitor. (i.e. numbers are examples, not factual)
Thats a good idea indeed. Making a one stop shop for royalty free image/audio.
Wow, nice way to expand… I wonder how well audio will do.
TechFilipino
This seems like a business that could work
@ Francis – I hope it does well, one of the key stumbling blocks for small game developers is access to quality to audio so this will be great.
I bet they will do well with this. iStock has great UI and the content they supply is always reasonably priced. Seems like a logical direction for their growth.
Interesting.
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When Getty Images bought iStockphoto, a lot of people despaired that Getty would effectively be putting itself (its much higher-priced self) out of business.
It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. Getty is building out a nice product line that delivers value to different sets of customers… defined by those customers.
The integration of audio is a great way of adding value and building loyalty for a lower-priced item.
It’s all about getting out in front of what’s happening on the Web (Flickr, etc.) and proving to clients/consumers that there’s still a reason to work with the “pros.”
This looks interesting and it might prove useful to all those developers looking to incorporate sound effects in their applications.
They’ve really moved beyond photos. Do I see a re-branding of the company name in the future?
If there’s one thing for sure is the number of fluffers from India hired to scour the net posting positive spin on anything and everything to do with Istockphoto.
Just check the Wikipedia revisions on ‘Controversies’ for Istock and you’ll get a taste of what our communist friends from Calgary can accomplish by fleecing thousands of people, 1 ‘credit’ at a time: http://en.wikip...oldid=238300798