What to Charge

In yesterday's poll of the week I was asking what you guys earn on average per minute of music and got extremely diverse results spanning from zero upfront to more than 2500 USD.

I know from my own history as well as from the ever recurring questions in forums that it remains a mystery for many people of how much to charge for what kind of job.

The poll from yesterday shows once more how wide the spread can be and any newcomer looking at the results of it would probably be completely puzzled.

As with every creative work, there barely are any industry standard guidelines to follow or a catalogue to look up what would be normal for a certain job. Additionally, geographic specifics might have a huge influence on the numbers. A large market like in the USA allows for much higher project budgets than a small European country which in consequence means that for example in the movie world, high budget European productions often have budgets that are considered Ultra Low Budget US productions and accordingly the creative fees differ radically.

Just to give you an idea of actual numbers and their range, let me show you the following example. I work quite regularly as orchestrator for films. In countries like the USA and UK, there are relatively strong musician's union that also cover orchestration and have set standard fees for this line of work. For the AFM there is this relatively cryptic chart that gives a very specific figure of what something will cost. The basis for a calculation here is a "per bar" rate which means that 20 bars of whole notes are charged similarly to 20 bars of 32 note runs. In other parts of the world, like here in Germany, a per minute rate  is more common which means that a minute of music at 50bpm is charged similarly to a minute of music at 180bpm. Both systems have pros and cons that assume that over several cues will even out the unfairness for specific cases (as mentioned above).

So just for the sake of having a clear example, let's assume we talk about a minute of music at 100 bpm which would amount to 25 bars of music for full symphonic line-up of 40 lines (=40 staves). For a Motion Picture, this would mean  according to this chart a rate of USD 49.88 per 4 bar page which would mean USD 311.75 per minute of music. If we now apply that to an entire score of let's say 60 minutes of music, this would be an orchestration rate of USD 18.705.

At the same time, here in Germany, orchestration rates are not fixed but can sometimes be as low as USD 100/minute which in the same context would mean USD 6.000 for the same project. As you can see, the span again is huge.

So where to start when you are asked for a quote?

As I said, things differ massively from line of work to location and everybody will have different experiences but here's what my general approach is:

As a rule of thumb, I personally see the "market value of a creative" (horrible wording but unfortunately that is exactly how the creative industry sees that) to go through three stages. At first they pay you for the work, then they pay you for the music and then they pay you for the name.

Depending on where you are in your career, your work profile will fall somewhere in these three categories and might even be different between projects. 

In the first stage, the easiest way to go about a budget is to break it down to actual workload. How many hours of work will you need for that project multiplied by an hourly fee that is reasonable. Being self employed and providing creative work means that your hourly fee needs to be higher than what you might think. Effectively, you should generally not go lower than a rate of USD 50 per hour to actually be economically sustaining. Of course this is depending on where and how you live and whether this work is your only stream of income but as a rule of thumb, this is about the rate that you should target as the low end for the actual work that you are doing.

With this breakdown by hour, as long as you can predict your work speed, you can realtively easily create an estimate that is economically sustainable for any work that you do. When I get hired for projects that just "need to get done" (e.g. orchestration etc.), I calculate the budget that I ask for mostly based on such a strategy.

In the next stage of your career, clients will start to approach you because they want you to do their project, they don't hire you because somebody needs to do the work but they hire you because they want your specific work based on your quality, style, experience etc.

With such projects, budgets can increase quite dramatically. With the client expecting a certain quality from your work, you get more leverage in budget negotiations. Clients don't pay you for your actual work load but for your experience, the many years you might have spent in learning and perfecting your art. With such projects, the calculation of a budget becomes trickier than just calculating how many hours of work you will need to spend. The essential thing is to develop a feeling when such a project comes along and not undersell yourself in such cases. 

In the third stage, clients will pay for your name. If company x wants Hans Zimmer, they will of course pay for his experience and craft, but they will also pay because he is Hans Zimmer. Now of course you don't need to be an A-list composer to be paid for your name but being known in the industry, having an impressive portfolio, awards will of course already raise your market value in this regard. In such cases and depending on how big the name is, budgets can go really high up (in case of A list composers easily into 7 figures).

Speaking of portfolio: much of that development mentioned above directly correlates with what you have done before. If your past work experience includes only no budget projects, you can not expect to have a lot of leverage in business negotiations when your first paid project comes along. So in general, budgets raise steadily and not in bursts. so you can base new budget estimates on things that you have done already and add some on top to not stall on the same level.

All of the things that I have said above are by no means universally applicable. We all know that meme:

This is a common situation in budget negotiations where it is unclear what scale the project that you're asked for has. It takes a bit of experience of developing a feeling of when it is appropriate to ask for what music budget is available and when not. For instance, if you get asked to work for a production by a movie director who seems to be like a one man or one woman show, it is definitely appropriate to inquire about the actually available music budget. If you are approached by a music executive of a large company, it is more appropriate to propose a budget (above what you actually want) and let them react on that.

There is (at least for me) one more factor at play in budget negotiations. I tend to compensate badly paid projects that I want to do because I enjoy them with well paid projects that I don't particularly enjoy. So in some cases where I know that budget is not much relevant (mainly in commercial/advertisment work) I ask for rates considerably higher than what would be "necessary" so I can work on fun projects that can't pay what would be "necessary". I do this particularly on projects where I have the feeling that in the long run there might be a development into more high profile projects.

One of these projects has been HERO which I thoroughly enjoyed without actually making any profit from that but creating a work relationship with the filmmakers of it seemed like the way more profitable decision for future projects.

The bottom line in all this is that as with the creative side, the business side of this career needs learning and experience as well. We all probably have a few projects where we gambled too high and lost or where we think we undersold ourselves. This also happens to more experienced composers but the more you do this the more you develop a feeling of what is appropriate. It is important that you value your own work and strategically reject projects that underpay. The further you progress in your career the more often you have the luxury of rejecting a job for bad conditions without needing to fear that this would cause you to not be able to pay your rent. Also, make sure that you raise your rate gradually on follow-up projects. Just because you started out at a certain rate doesn't justify that you keep that rate forever even after gaining a couple more years of experience.

Unfortunately it is not really common in the composer community to talk about money and what composer x earned with project y. And especially when you get an inquiry for a job in a line of work that you haven't worked in before, it might be really tricky to estimate in what budget range this will move. In such cases it might help to do some research and also ask others for advice. However, this will not guarantee that you hit a bullseye in budget negotiations with the client (as in hitting the highest number that they are still willing to pay).

When in doubt and especially with new clients, it might be safest to go for the strategy to break it down by workload and hourly rate.