I’ve been having fun making presets for the Syntakt, Hydrasynth and some other gear lately and I started to think about whether it makes sense to bundle any of it and put it up on the marketplace.
Which leads to my questions:
Is there a common marketplace for these kinds of things, or is it different for every product? For example, how does one make their own sound pack available on elektron.se?
Is it generally worth the effort or is the probability of someone ever finding your pack close to zero?
Any best practices to consider?
Is having a channel to promote your music (eg YouTube) a must to do this successfully?
I guess you need to have a good follower base to have some success. You can start selling them on gumroad, but all marketing is up to you. Then after your audience grows you could have a Patreon. Those suggestions are all based on self promotion and using the available selling tools out there and not going for specialized marketplaces like elektron.se. I’m sure others could give more input on that.
Gumroad is great for this kind of thing. Of course they take a cut, but they have a lot of useful tools, analytics etc that make it worth it imo.
At the peak of my sample pack sales (e.g. when I was putting them out regularly) I was getting around $100 a week and I was only really promoting them here, on youtube and on a few facebook groups.
I could have kept it up but the sample editing sessions are quite time consuming. I still have a bunch of sound design sessions from 2019 that I need to edit down into sample packs, but I just don’t have the time anymore.
Themes are good. Either a pack focused on a certain style, or machine, or both. I’ve found my best packs to be the ones that focus on getting a specific sound out of a machine.
Also, making a free version with a smaller amount of samples works really well. Either that or some good demo tracks made with the samples.
It goes a long way, yeah. I still get people stumbling upon my demo videos, commenting positively and buying the packs. I haven’t even put anything on youtube since March. Granted, I’m not making much money off them anymore, but that’s ok because I have other income sources now.
As for getting packs on the Elektron site.. I never managed that, but I also never sent them anything, so
i bought a few sound packs on gumroad before.
dont browse gumroad, but just find soundpack demos on youtube.
i mostly buy presets for synthesizers that are not fun to create patches on, eg circuit.
id imagine syntakt and hydra patches are going to be less desirable, because its fun to make sounds on them.
also i find specialist packs more interesting than generalist packs.
so a pack dedicated to a certain mood/tone is more interesting to me than a pack where its a little of everything.
Only ever released one proper sound pack (Prophet 6, earlier this year) and distributed it for free or pay-what-you-want via Bandcamp. Put out a promo video on Youtube (only have about 50 subs there), posted about it here once. Has made me 3€ so far. Quite a few downloads tho so hopefully there are people out there putting the sounds to good use.
For me it was more of a side-product of making sounds for my own use and in general learning the synth better. But unless you have a decent following or really manage to pull off something spectacular, you don’t have to start thinking about which synth you’re going to buy next with all the money you earned in sound pack sales.
I am at the beginning of this journey too. So far 200 downloads of a free pack that’s supposed to be door opener to get people on an email list to build a connection with more free stuff (what is still open) and to promote later products to. Not too bad for 2 weeks and literally no expectations.
Yes you need a big following, most are just there for the free stuff. 0.5% to 1% conversion rate for paid products is the norm. So be realistic, don’t quit your main income just yet
From chatting with other nauts about that and similar topics it seems sound packs for instruments and project to play around are very well accepted.
Really appreciate the input everyone, thank you! This confirms much of what I suspected, and just to be clear, I was thinking of income purely as a potential (tiny) bonus down the road, not as a way to justify the time and money poured into this hobby.
Most of all, I just feel like being a little more connected with the community and contributing back in other ways than just threads on forums and in YouTube comments. I feel like I’m serious about this hobby, yet I spend most of the time contributing in the form of text, rather than what the hobby is all about. I’d like to think that exposing myself a bit more would also potentially help me grow as a musician.
The idea is, I spend a disproportionate amount of my time playing with synths, exploring sounds and occasionally stumbling on gold, and it would be fun to share some of that gained knowledge in some shape or form. Even if it’s just on a donation basis and 99% of the seven people downloading the packs would not pay anything, it would still be a fun experience I think.
