For years now, iStock has changed how the world looks. It's time to change how it sounds. Welcome to iStockaudio. Starting a little later on today, we will begin accepting submissions from musicians, composers, recording engineers and audio artists. We want music, spoken word tracks, sound effects, ambient loops, wild noises, field recordings – we want it all. In just a few months we'll start offering royalty-free music clips and sound effects for as little as $1 each. We want to hear your stuff.

Once the Audio page is live, head to our tutorial and get to work recording your 3 sample tracks. Our Audio team, headed up by thepugnatious and bonesmear, have their headphones on, ready to listen. Visit our new Audio forum and introduce yourself to the rest of our prospective Sound Artists. iStock has always been about helping people communicate. With audio in the mix, we will have the most complete offering of multimedia files available for designers anywhere. We've seen what people have done with our stuff, now we can't wait to hear it.

We have added a new ticket and e-mail option for all of our contributors and prospective contributors. If you have any questions, concerns and suggestions or need help with your uploads, stats, policies, procedures, legal questions, canisters, Exclusivity etc. please contact us directly on the Support page.

Basically, anything related to being a contributor on iStock, please use the Contributor Relations ticket option and we'll help you out.

iStockphoto introduces Subscriptions on Monday, May 26th. Your portfolio has automatically been opted-in for subscribers to download. If you have any questions or if you want to opt-out, we've prepared this page to provide answers

Sure is quiet around here today.

A new version of the ImageManager Pro has been released. Get all the details here:

ImageManager Pro 0.6.0 release

The Basic version has not been updated yet, but will get an update soon.

I was on a plane returning from Calgary when I had a moment of realization. We are having difficulties professionally managing the careers of our peers, especially our exclusive contributors who have placed their creative futures in our hands. The exclusive community has grown to an unbelievably large group. Matched with the growth of iStock, the numbers are staggering. When I returned to Seattle, I phoned JJRD and told him he needed to move across the country to HQ and unite the scrappy and able teams that have been building iStock and managing the careers of the tens of thousands of iStock contributing artists. The essense of being an iStockphoto artist, the lifeblood of our community is sometimes a collective and sometimes an individual voice. These voices need to have representation and a solid presence at HQ as our explosive growth continues. The inspection process can never turn into a robotic experience, but a creative, inspiring, helpful and educational process. In the future, inspections and the relationships we have with our artists need to exceed the quality that iStock was built on.

Over the years we have tried to introduce the inspection team to you, but the group has invented itself and grown up so quickly, it's difficult to keep up.

The inspection team, combined with the staff at HQ, Europe and Japan is now over 200. It's not the same office it used to be when I could talk to Joyze from across the room, but we try to keep the culture the same.

We've made some promotions and changes inside iStockphoto and I think it's important you know what those changes are.

Joyze - Senior Director of Contributor Relations: New Position
Joy Griffith is in charge of building the Contributor Relations department. We used to have this group as part of Client Relations, but found the time it takes to answer contributors was taking far too long. This group now has a medium sized team, including the Scout function, Site Communications, etc. We expect to see swift changes inside this group and the way everything from tickets to payments are handled.

Lisegagne - Artistic Director: New Position leading JJ's Angels
Lise is taking on a new role as iStockphoto's Artistic Director. Who better could iStock have this role than our original diva extraordinaire! If anyone knows anything about making stock, Lise knows it all.

Sirimo - Photo Lead: Replacing JJRD
Simon has been with me nearly from the start of iStock. Much respect to Simon. He is a very capable guy and has the dubious task of replacing JJRD in his previous role as Photo Lead – he now leads the inspection team and answers to JJRD.

Gremlin - Technical Lead: Replacing Sirimo
Kajanja ubija! Matjaz, my long time friend is taking over Simon's previous role as the technical lead for the team. This is an extremely difficult job and requires a great deal of knowledge and constant learning.

JJRD - VP Content Development: New Position

JJRD (and soon HeleneCanada) moved from Quebec to unite people at HQ
and the Inspection team and insure the quality of content increases and
oversee the overall contributor's experience. This role is extremely
important to have a great leader at the helm as the largest team at
iStockphoto.

I would really like to hear your comments on this new structure, those with an org-minded brain. Please help me in welcoming these people to their new roles and especially JJRD for moving from Quebec to Calgary to dedicate his waking life to an idea and a way of life that he believes in so much.

Ready to Fly by Renee Lee (Renphoto) takes iStockphoto's collection to the dizzy height of 3 million files.

Thanks go to all the contributors, customers, inspectors, admins and everyone at HQ that make this place like nothing else on earth... a perfectly mutual symbiosis. The collection continues to expand at a jaw dropping rate with over a quarter of a million files uploaded last month alone.

Congratulations again to Renee and the whole iStockphoto community. Fasten your seatbelts, it's time to go supersonic...