GI royalties Summary

So there is some confusion about how and wehy the GI roylaties work. Since there has been a significant increase in royalties for SFX artists I will attempt to outline all of the details here:
#1 Who get royalties?

• GettyImages.com roylaties are from 3 sources. GettyImages.com (SFX only) RoyaltyFreeMusic.com (Music only) and Apple notifications (SFX & edited stingers)
• 100% of our SFX as of June 2012 are on GettyImages.com. We may ingest more in the future but these ingestions will be infrequent, such as yearly.
• RoyaltyFreeMusic.com files are added by myslef or my team. There are VERY specific criteria for these files therefore you can NOT suggest fies. We are adding to this collection monthly. Currently we have over 500 tracks  at RFM. That is less than 5% of their collection.
• Apple notification files were added by conducting a focus group with NYC getty employees & then subject to approval by Apple ingestion staff. This descision was 100% our of our control. There are currently 140 files online. A few Contributors have 1-5 files. We would like to add to this collection but at this time apple is not accepting new files.

#2 Sales performance

• GettyImages.com has never hosted SFX before, therefore as a new product it will take some time to grow. As the Getty clients become more aware of the SFX product sales will certainly grow.
• RoyaltyFreeMusic.com has been in need of new content. We are supplying this content, however It willl take some time for the RFM clients to notice the new content. It will also take some time for us to transfer a decent collection size. I personally have no expectations for this content, and we ail need to wait and see how the RFM customers respond.
• Apple Notifications - we wanted to develop a relationship with Apple, and we felt this was a good first step. We anticipated that the sales would be very small, but we were VERY surprised. 100% of files have more than 20 downloads. Most files have more than 1000 sales so far (4 months). So the majority of your GI.com sales are from Apple. While this is very exciting we also understand that there are some of you that nave more files hosted than others. We would love to even the playing field, but this is outside of our control. Also, understand that this is the honeymoon phase. There is no guarantee that this level of success will continue. We have no control over what new content Apple will add, or how our content will be featured; sales numbers in the future are unknown. 

#3 Royalties

• All GettyImages.com sales are at 35%
• All apple notification files are sold for $1 USD apple keeps 30¢ and your cut is 35% if 70¢ That rounds up to 25¢ per file.
• Any royalty for more than 25¢ is a GettyImages.com or RoyaltyFreeMusic.com sale.
• As will all partner royalties these royalties do NOT go towards redeemed credits.
• You can see your GettyImages.com royalties by:
• Going to the File Closeup of any file
• Clicking administration then View file download history
• GI sales are listen in the G.I. Sales Tab

Other info

• 100% of sales have been added to your account and to stats for GI sales in the months of May-September. In the future these will be updated monthly.
• GI sales do not add to the downloads for a track. Downloads for a track are only for iStock sales.

Any Other Questions?

(Edited on 2012-10-30 10:58:18 by thepugnatious)

This is the best possibile conversation/answer/behavior/relationship in yeeeeaaaars of Istock existance! 

Hats down for the audio team (and IT/programmers) You guys are trying and trying and making it happen! Thank you for this opportunitty! 

As for the questions, here's one:
From Monday 20th till Sunday 26th August there are "empty days", no purple bars... Apple sales. And stats just continued on Monday 27th and gone further. Is this normal behavior? One week with no sales? Not only me, few others! 

Thanks again! Very professional and brave! 
Again, congrats! This is a big success for you and us! 

(Edited on 2012-10-29 17:50:18 by Mirkic)

Also, the RFM with dot com is a link for wifi equipment and GI with dot com is a motorola website... the istock's forum is making it an active link (or is it windows) so you may wanna write the full website name cause it puzzled me when I realised that we got sales on Motorola and that wifi equipement company is in need of new music content )) 

Searching GI.com I can find only a few of my SFX, but as of June 2012 there must have been hundreds of them already uploaded and approved on IS. Is there a delay of some kind?

So we have to open up every audio file to see if we've had GI/Apple sales?

eta: No, I see I have no GI/Apple link on any of my audio files.

(Edited on 2012-10-29 19:11:18 by sjlocke)

Fantastic - thanks for that Dave! This is really awesome and for SFX artists this is really a great opportunity to feel a little success Thank you so much to you and your team for this fabulous work.

on an exchange rate note - the files sell for $1.19 in australia. Are Apple keeping the extra bit?

edit: I see when I click on the files I happen know to be on the Apple system in my portfolio, then Administrator, then file downloads, then click back to June through September, I can retrieve the numbers and dates. Not exactly as easy as the exclusives seem to have it, but the info is there.


When will non-exclusive contributors be given access to the "GI" sales information in the "my uploads" section?

(Edited on 2012-10-29 21:41:48 by DarylFX)

Thank you!

wow, greatest OP ever! Thank you guys for this nice piece of info all in one place, sooo good!

Thank you! I've found my winner, probably I have more file(s) but it's hard to guess between 2500 files . That was biggest surprise in my life

(Edited on 2012-10-30 02:24:17 by FxProSound)

Thanks for the clear OP.


I've had a chance to look through stats and have seen the same gap in sales between the 20th and 26th of August


Thanks again for the opportunity!

I also have this gap. Between 20th and 26th August. Just letting you know....


Thanks for all the info! And thanks for the opportunity!

I also want to show my appreciation for the itunes opportunity. Thank You! Really Cool. My only hope is to see this expand for all of us and to see continued growth.

These are the stats that were provided by Apple. It seems as if they had some sort of outage that week.

Cool! Thanks for the answer! And again, whatever the outcome from all of these "projects" be, thanks again for the opportunity! Great work!

Sorry, I'm still lost. How do you see Apple sales?

Have you tried searching by title? I can find some of yours… Remember that your newer sounds will not be included. Because the ingestion process took some time it is possible that files uploaded after March 2012 will not be included.

(Edited on 2012-10-30 23:23:08 by thepugnatious)

SJ you only had one file from Apple - 9206840 you can view the individual download stats on that file.

The extra exchange rate difference s are kept by the company. The value of every sale is $1 USD, companies make a standard practice of overcharrging on the exchange. This buffer protects them from fluctuations in the market. In the end each sale is still only worth $1 of which we get 70¢ and you get 25¢.

No, non exclusives do not have access to this. In fact it is very lucky that a few non-exclusive files were chosen for this project. That was only done as the decision was out of our hands. Generally Gety Images partner programs are only offered to Exclusive artists.