How to Make Marketable Sound Effects

By SFXsource

A well planned sound effect library will return profits online when marketed as single downloadable products. Sound effect buyers seem to be moving away from purchasing full libraries of thousands of sounds and are instead buying small batches of audio clips as downloadable products since faster internet speeds now accommodate online purchasing. As a sound designer you may use the pointers that follow to design a well purposed library that will successfully access the downloadable internet stream.

1. A main tenet in building a profitable sound library is to record at least several thousand sound effects. In order to provide enough choices for customers, three thousand total products is a good goal.

2. Video editors like to use loops that they can fit to particular scenes so create loopable elements from longer ambiances such as traffic noise.

3. Its better to go for breadth rather than depth when trying to maximize sales so instead of having fifty dog barks, have 5 noises from ten different animals.

4. Since sound effects are used for a variety of purposes, create 44.1 16bit .mp3s for use on the internet, 48k 24bit for film, .aiffs for Mac owners, and .wavs for PC users.

5. Find the maximum number of websites to sell through since each e-commerce site has unique customers bases who may be interested in purchasing your sounds thus increasing your overall sales.

6. In the long run it may be worth the trouble and effort to build your own site for selling your effects. You can self-promote this site via link building, forum participation, and article writing.

The number of buyers of sound effects will only multiply as more internet users come online and the advice mentioned above are certain methods for making your sound effect library as marketable as possible.

About the Author:

Search vast amounts of royalty free production music at Royalty Free Music and check out SFXsource's sound effect library and demo great sound effects at Sound Effects