Jump to content

Leaderboard

Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 06/06/2011 in all areas

  1. Your numbers are way off. Robin's are closer to the mark. Since you're looking at a package deal here, let me build you an estimate that I think is fair for your position. It's going to be long, but bear with me... Overview For 14-15 songs, let's assume 1-2 minute for each just for the sake of discussion. That's between 15-30 minutes of music you need to write by the deadline. Now let's say it takes you 3 hours to fully produce a minute of music that you're happy to send to the client. That would be between 45-90 hours of work on your end, not counting any slowdowns for moments of no inspiration nor technical glitches nor any other unforeseeable circumstances. For the sake of keeping this clean, we'll assume everything goes perfectly (it rarely does) and that you have time to work on it comfortably at your own pace (you rarely will) and say that you're looking at 50 hours of work. Creative Fee What you're doing is called a job. It's called a job because it's a legitimate means of sustaining yourself, just like any other far less satisfying alternative like flipping burgers. I state the obvious because you need to make sure you're treating it as such. Now, I don't know where you live, but find out what minimum wage is in your region. Let's say $9/hour. That means that for you to do this job, your baseline creative fee is around $450. $810 or so if you're looking at 90 hours of work as in the top end of our above estimate. That is the minimum amount you need to charge them in order for it to be worth your time. Otherwise you're effectively paying them to work on the game, which is backwards and has far less value than people imagine it does, even for those starting out. Now we think beyond the basic work fee. How much does your rent cost? Electricity for running your studio machines? Internet service? Office supplies? Software updates? Repairs and maintenance for equipment? The work that you do must contribute to the upkeep of your business, so find those numbers, add them, divide by the number of projects you expect to get in a year, and add the result to our baseline fee from above. Let's say you live at home and parents pay for most of it, so you'll only be contributing a little; we'll add $200 and call it a day. We're at $650 (or $1,010 at the top end) now and that's your creative fee. Edits & Revisions I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that, despite your genius, the client is not going to like every track that you write from its first version. They'll want edits. Edits take time. Time is money. You see where I'm going with this. You're a cool guy and you want to build a sweet relationship with this client so they give you more work though, right? So you say "Alright, let's talk edits. I'm friendly and confident in my abilities, so I'll waive the first round of edits — it's on me — so you only pay for subsequent edits at a rate of $30 per round" And they go "sweet muppet sandwich, Batman, you're the finest of friends!" and agree to it. Now you include that in your estimate. To re-cap, your estimate looks like this: Creative Fee: $650 ($1,010) First Round Edits: $0 Subsequent Edits: $30/edit Unit Sales Benefit So far so good. Now let's talk back-end. If you walk with just the creative fee above, you're covering your costs and nothing more. You're barely making a profit and you have no long-term income. Since freelancing is a fickle business, it is absolutely crucial that you secure multiple avenues of income from each gig. This one is promising because you have the soundtrack sale thing in there too, but we'll get to that in a moment. For now let's chat about sales revenue. Most companies won't give you a percentage of sales — period. Let's assume this one will be like that. Instead, you propose the following "Say, Barnaby, how about we make it more fair for both of us? I have a system in mind that lets me share in your eventual success but doesn't hurt you if the rapture doesn't come...what say you?" And Barnaby replies "Intrigue, bambino! Tell me more!" so you tip your hat, look left and right, lean in, and intone: "Unit sales, mate. You're selling the game for a dollar, right? Well let's say you sell 10,000 copies. You've just made $10,000 minus Apple's 30% cut. $7,000 is a beautiful thing. And you appreciate the effort that your artists put in for you, of course, so how about you set aside $1,000 of that money for me? If you don't hit 10,000 sales, it's no biggie! But if you do...then you toss that $1,000 my way and we all ride off into the sunset!" to which Barnaby answers "you, sir, are a marvelous specimen of the species and I harbour strong feelings of platonic affection for you." And just like that you're making an extra grand each time they hit ten thousand sales. Not bad. You think it's too much? Surely music contributes at least one tenth of a game's value, no? Oh, and Angry Birds has sold over 200 million copies, by the way. Highly unlikely any other game will, but you never know. You can ask them to send you a monthly sales update, by the way, so you can keep an eye on things. Re-cap: Creative Fee: $650 ($1,010) First Round Edits: $0 Subsequent Edits: $30/edit Unit Sales Benefit: $1,000/10,000 units sold Soundtrack Sales And that leaves us with the soundtrack sales. This could go several ways depending on how they're planning to sell your soundtrack. Physical CD? In-app purchase? Page on their website? Page on yours? Both? In any event, you need to figure out how much it will cost you. BandCamp is free, but it won't get you on iTunes or Amazon. Signing up for Tunecore or CDBaby or the like will, but that has a fee associated with it. Making physical discs? That costs money. And who's designing the album art, by the way? Unless you're good at it or they have a designer on board willing to do it, you get to find an artist and hire them to do it. Money money money. And how much of the album revenue are you keeping, by the way? If they're encouraging it, then either they love music and your work or else they expect to get a cut. Figure out which it is and plan accordingly. Let's say for the sake of our model that you're not making physical CDs, that you'll be using BandCamp to keep it free and enable you to sell lossless audio, that you don't have a designer, and that you get to keep album revenue. Estimate now says: Creative Fee: $650 ($1,010) First Round Edits: $0 Subsequent Edits: $30/edit Unit Sales Benefit: $1,000/10,000 units sold Album art design: $300 (unless you have an artist friend willing to do it for less or you settle with cheapo "El Pepe's" album art shack) Now you can wrap that up nicely in a formal estimate PDF and send it to them for review. Voila! Professional estimate delivered. Parting Thoughts Of course, you can decide to charge them less as you see fit — tweak the numbers to fit your situation — and so forth. But I caution you to avoid quoting too low. You need to teach clients to value you. If you bend over to their stupidest lowball offers, then all you're teaching them is that you have no backbone and are willing to hoe yourself out. If they learn that, why would they even consider budgeting more for their next project? They know you're willing to do it for peanuts, so they'll happily find other ways to spend their money and expect you to continue working for peanuts. If you give them a minimum that you can work for and they say they don't have the budget, then you say "well, maybe next time! I really appreciate the offer — call me if anything changes" and you walk away. You walk away because they can't afford you and that's their problem, not yours. You may be amused at how many times they will then turn around several days later and say "weeeeeell we found some extra money, and...." And if they don't, then frankly they probably weren't the kind of client that appreciates good work anyway — and if they don't then it's never fun to work with them, which makes your job feel like a chore, and frankly the whole point of doing freelancing work is to do what you love for a living...so if it starts to feel like a bunch of suck then you haven't accomplished anything. So don't let people push you around just because you're fresh. Everyone needs to do some charity gigs, but do them for people you like or for projects you feel inspired by, don't just snap up free projects to pad your resume. Your work has value and no one in the world is going to accept than until you defend it. And the only way for you to defend it is to have the integrity to stick to the numbers you need to see in order to make the work worth your time. That's what it comes down to in the end. You write music because you love it, but love doesn't pay the bills. It's a business and you need to develop that aspect of your knowledge as well if you want to get anywhere. Hopefully this post will help you start thinking in those terms. Good luck and let us know how it goes :happy:
    3 points
  2. Here is a hint - try the progression with this (/D = means D in bass , etc) Fflat major/Fflat, Bflat major/D, G flat major/G flat, C maj/G nat, A flat major/A flat, Fflat major/A flat, E flat major/G. This is all in E flat with a chromatic ascent. I know you have a different bass line but this may help you better understand the opening is not atonal, rather you allude to E flat minor and its relative major G flat major before settling on E flat major. This is along the lines of what your teacher is talking about. Review your whole piece in this context of E flat major, its parallel minor E flat minor and the relative major of E flat minor - G flat major.
    1 point
×
×
  • Create New...