How much to charge for music?

So I have my first paying gig and its pretty substantial. I am to compose 14-15 8-bit songs for an iPhone game. The soundtrack will also be sold digitally separately.

The "developer" said that since they are using crowd funding to fund the project he was pretty open to any kind of quote from me.

I just don't know where to start...I can either ask for a portion of each sale and a small flat fee, or an upfront fee of like...$300 and nothing after that? The second way is probably not a good idea but I don't know much about the company doing the game and if it will really sell.

Are my numbers way off?

posting to subscribe. also curious.

Why.

Not to be overly facetious, but sometimes that actually is a prudent option when you want to dispell an inappropriate figure.

In this case, I can see no advantage to flippantly blowing off a client's legitimate question on $$$$$$ to be paid out to the composer.

Go for a flat fee.

- what's the expected popularity of this game? How likely are sales to grow? Whats the point of asking for $0.07 of every sale if the damned thing sells 17 copies!?

- how will you track it? Weekly sales reports? Monthly? Where will you get your numbers? How long to you get paid for? 1 year of sales? Ten? How frequently?

On the other hand - if it does take off and you've got the next Angry Birds... :whistling:

14 tunes? Ask for $2,500, and see what happens.

Go for a flat fee.

- what's the expected popularity of this game? How likely are sales to grow? Whats the point of asking for $0.07 of every sale if the damned thing sells 17 copies!?

- how will you track it? Weekly sales reports? Monthly? Where will you get your numbers? How long to you get paid for? 1 year of sales? Ten? How frequently?

On the other hand - if it does take off and you've got the next Angry Birds... :whistling:

14 tunes? Ask for $2,500, and see what happens.

$2,500? haha geez, I wasn't planning on going over $500. I agree that I would want the flat, but I don't want to shoot myself later if it actually ends up selling. But then again you do have a good point with the whole "how will the actual bookkeeping be done" thing. He said he has future game plans so maybe that would also be a factor. I definitely think $2,500 is too much in this case though haha, I don't want to offend the guy.

Three thoughts.

a) Don't sell yourself short. Make sure you're making minimum wage at least. Since you're not paid hourly, certainly plan for time lost due to problems that aren't "your fault" -- like a file corrupting or something like that, or a weird plugin conflict that you'd never experienced.

b) If there's a potential for the game to be popular, what might work better is more like an advance/recoup kind of setup, where you're paid x-amount (say $500 for 50 hours of work) at the start, but that's really just $500 out of the royalty payment. Since you're not likely part of BMI or ASCAP, you might want to get it all in writing and run it by a Free Lawyer for the Arts to make sure you're not getting boned.

c) How is the soundtrack released? if it's a physical thing, there should be a lot more work involved on both your ends. If it's digital or a less official physical release, then probably a %age on that would be best.

So I have my first paying gig and its pretty substantial. I am to compose 14-15 8-bit songs for an iPhone game. The soundtrack will also be sold digitally separately.

The "developer" said that since they are using crowd funding to fund the project he was pretty open to any kind of quote from me.

I just don't know where to start...I can either ask for a portion of each sale and a small flat fee, or an upfront fee of like...$300 and nothing after that? The second way is probably not a good idea but I don't know much about the company doing the game and if it will really sell.

Are my numbers way off?

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:

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:

Haha geez, much appreciated Marius. You pretty much summed it all up.

Today I decided to quote him $50 per track, which leaves me a little under what you have here for the creative fee. I considered doing it by the hour and I think that would be the best way to think about it next time but too late this time. In the end I would have quoted the same amount either way.

I see what you mean about making people believe that I have worth but at this point I don't think I can charge for edits since I am not completely confident that my first judgement is always the best judgement anyway. But I see what you mean and the fee is small so I may do that anyway.

The backend idea is great. I'll mention that. Just not sure if 10,000 is a realistic projection for them even if they think it might be a hit. I'll have to see if I can gauge that from them.

As far as the soundtrack it will be digital. And I was thinking bandcamp. The "art" could even be an image from the game, and it could be sold as a digital download, which leaves little to no overhead (paypal fees maybe) I would also ask the game to link to it or at least advertise it on the main menu screen.

Also, what about copyrights? I assume I should retain ownership since I'm not doing this through a publisher or anything

No worries.

As I said, you should shift the figures to fit your situation, I was just giving an example. A per-track rate is a fine way to go. I typically do a per-minute-of-music rate because I work very fast, so if I charged by hour I would get less and less money the better I got at doing the work :P

As for copyrights, you definitely need to stipulate that all ownership remains yours and that what they're getting is an exclusive usage license for this project. Meaning they're free to use the music however they want in connection to this specific project, but that you are able to freely sell and advertise it without consulting them. If they want to own the music entirely, double your price — at least — right off the bat.

good post marius.

they are bastards that's for sure, you will work for decent pay once you'll need it. i'm getting lousy $$$ for iphone games as well, and i know i'll lose some costumers if i raise the bar. but it just not worth the time just for the sake of making a few $$. its in fact, less rewarding-since you probably won't make grand music as much as you could with bigger budgets, since you spend your time stocking cash for composing time, instead of stocking cash from composing-to composing! so you spend time on the wrong job. anyway, you'll get the picture after a few projects like this, it ain't a serious living if you don't take it seriously.

good post marius.

they are bastards that's for sure, you will work for decent pay once you'll need it. i'm getting lousy $$$ for iphone games as well, and i know i'll lose some costumers if i raise the bar. but it just not worth the time just for the sake of making a few $$. its in fact, less rewarding-since you probably won't make grand music as much as you could with bigger budgets, since you spend your time stocking cash for composing time, instead of stocking cash from composing-to composing! so you spend time on the wrong job. anyway, you'll get the picture after a few projects like this, it ain't a serious living if you don't take it seriously.

cool man you've done work with iPhone games? mind if I ask what you charged/were able to charge? I don't plan on this being my main area I write for but I can't turn anything down at the moment haha.

no, because its not something i'm proud of. i just told you i'm not working under these fees again.

i saw in indie dev forums prices goes down as much as 20$ a track, i take alot more.

you should charge as much as you can, don't cheapen yourself, ask for the maximum at least and then go down if you really must have that gig.

So I thought I would let you all know how this turned out, in short, The guy offered me more money than I had originally asked for, which seemed pretty noble of him.

So now you know what the LOW end of a fair price is, if he was willing to go up to it. :) Keep it in mind for future deals, bud.

i always say, what's your budget, but clients really like to hide it, so you have to be clever enough to get them out of it, without being an donkey.

i always say, what's your budget, but clients really like to hide it, so you have to be clever enough to get them out of it, without being an donkey.

Yea I tried this hah, my professor said it was the way to go. Didn't work this time but i'll try harder next time.

Question: what is average track length? Does this length include any looping of the track?

In my opinion, a fair number to ask would be $20 per track on the low end, and $40 on the high.

Average track length will be between 1 and 2 minutes, and about half of them will loop. I ended up getting $75 per track :)

Damn - I would not charge minimum wage for my work. Marius gave a fantastic guideline (which he should charge for or start into a book btw) I'd add in experience and skill level. Money was put out for lessons and school and although your first job, you have to differentiate yourself from those who have NOT made the investment and think they can just cut and paste to make a game track.

So let's say you have a BA in music, and it was at a state school - $6,000 a year. Did 4 years of that. $24,000 a year plus books etc. Figure you want to pay it off in 5 years, that is about 5,000 a year. So 52 weeks into 5,000 = 82/week. Round up for interest and what not. $100 a week should go automatically into your base going forward for you whole career (and adjusted for inflation) because your BA if you really got the most from it, will have a return for a lifetime. Also, do research on onet for very basic info on salaries for film composers. Anyway my point is education and experience should go into your base too. The way to think of experience is for every project you do how much time and prep would be needed if you had to show someone how to do this.

As this is your first gig and I do not know your education and experience, the figure I came up with is very hypothetical. But as you progress this becomes a significant factor.

Average track length will be between 1 and 2 minutes, and about half of them will loop. I ended up getting $75 per track :)

That's not bad at all! Sounds like a cool thing. Will this be in the public soon?

Money was put out for lessons and school and although your first job, you also have to differentiate yourself from those who have NOT made the investment and think they can just cut and paste to make a game track.

This is an extremely good point and I'm glad you made it. It's one of several considerations I left out in my initial estimate but it can be an important thing to factor in.

Phil, the numbers you mentioned and consider "fair" are the reason it's increasingly difficult to make a living as a composer. Don't be part of the problem. Charging less than the competition to take advantage of cheap clients and get the job devalues the work of everyone, not just you, when done to that extent. Undercutting so viciously just isn't cool, and all it does is teach them that you think you're just as cheap as they do. We all need to make money but not so desperately that we compromise our integrity and respect for the industry to do it.

Phil,

Sorry for coming down on you, I wasn't really meaning to target you specifically — as you said, it's a frustrating situation. I reacted poorly and I apologize.

In any event, it's definitely a free market and that's something to be celebrated, but in order for it to remain a positive thing I think that anyone who does pursue music commercially has a responsibility to cultivate a sense of value for what they do. And that can come about through standing by higher rates for their own work and/or sharing their experience with others who are just entering the fray so as to prepare them for what they're getting in to and how to avoid falling prey to it.

Quick question: How did you get the gig in the first place? And how do you intend to get more after this? Just word-of-mouth?

hey everyone, some updates and comments.

I did just graduate with a bachelors in music business. I can definitely see factoring that into my price in the future. But this is literally my first project and I really like the game idea. The other thing is that, while I think if i had asked for 500-1000$ a minute, he would have been ok with that, (Now that we've negotiated a bit), except it might have taken another year to secure that kind of funding to put out the game.

We ended up going with $100 a track, 10% royalty up to 40k (basically game revenue) and 100% of soundtrack sales. He offered me more because he wants exclusivity on the tracks. I'm cool with that as long as I can get the soundtrack sales. He'll also need sound design at some point so more $$$ for me!

stewboy: I found this gig on the Kongregate forums, which is strange because usually projects there aren't that serious. I got lucky with this one, and he already gave his friend who needs game music my email ;) As far as internet gaming forums go, Kongregate takes most of the cake for the flash community. Newgrounds is even more "unprofessional". I have other sources for possible future projects, I have a bunch of friends working in video game sound design and stuff like that but this is a good start

as far as when its out, it won't be until at least late fall, the funding project is supposed to start in late august.

Also I'd appreciate some comments on one of the loops! it was one of the first submitted to the new system