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.