Anyone use Photoshelter for licensing their music images?

I'm preparing some images to upload there. Have you tried contacting any PSC music photo contributors? That would be a good place to start. I'm interested in this too since they pay 70% to the photographer. Maybe we can make a list of existing contributors there, and divide and conquer to survey their returns from PSC.

I have quite a number of concert images on PSC but no sales to date.

Cheers, Richard
www.blackshadow.com.au

What would you all think of begging, groveling, pushing, asking, etc, every music photographer we know to submit images to PSC? Photographers own the photographs. We could collectively unseat places like Retna, etc, just through where we choose to place our images for licensing. I'm sure the 70% commission that PSC passes on to the photographer is far better than places like Retna, Wireimage, Getty, Corbis, etc. and it costs nothing. We could make PSC the place for publications to go to for music photographs.

I own a domain name called "MusicStockPhoto.com". What could we do with that? Its an outstanding name that I was shocked no one had taken when I purchased it. I wonder if there would be a way to send queries for that domain to the music photo collection at PSC? I wonder if PSC has an API we could use to hook into MusicStockPhoto.com. They could manage all the licensing details, host the image database, etc. We provide the perfect domain for publications to go to. Yes? No? Other ideas for the domain?

Walter,

The obvious thing to do with that domain is to set up a Music Stock Photo agency! I'm sure the software/web side of things would be pretty easy to set up but the marketing/sales side would present more of a challenge.

You could see if PSC or one of the other stock agencies is interested in doing something with it, the worst thing they can do is say no!

I've been a member of PSC for close to a year and have approximately 1,000 images up there but I'm still waiting for my first sale. I'm wondering if Retna or someone who specialises more in music photography would generate more sales, even if the photographer's cut is less.

Cheers, Richard
www.blackshadow.com.au

...it doesn't matter how much more they offer.. 70% of nothing is still nothing. I have had images up there for about 6 months and not one sale yet... plus.. it's a pain in the ass to get them approved... it takes about a month and by then the story and any interest in it is LONG gone. Even if you label it "Breaking News" as directed, it still takes at least a week.

Daniel Knighton
Pixel Perfect Images
(760)730-3224/(858)335-4540 cell
Carlsbad, CA
www.PixelPerfectImages.net
www.MySpace.com/PixelPerfectImages

I'm with photoshelter as well and like others on here haven't had a sale through them yet.

One thing I would say for them though is that they're not the place to go for your fresh images of that weeks big news. They're a stock agency first and foremost rather than a wire agency. So I think the best way of using them at the moment is as somewhere to put images once they're a month or two old and interest from other agencies has dropped off.

Also bear in mind that they're still very new at the moment and don't have the contacts and industry penetration that the likes of Corbis, Getty etc have. They are working very hard on it though and certainly seem to making progress in leaps and bounds on the stock side of things.
--
Mike Gatiss
"Dont' lose the moment..."
http://www.gig-shots.com

Maybe we could help PSC a little by pointing them towards the publications we know would be interested in our images?