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Hello,
Question for the community, and especially for those who’ve been doing this for awhile. As someone who produces music for artists as well, I always despise seeing people post ads like “10 exclusive-rights instrumentals for $50!” smh. It devalues everyone’s craft.
My *assumption* is that this holds true in the sync world as well. I’m building my own personal platform (as my own publisher) on SourceAudio and I’m setting up my rate cards. Having to learn a lot. What I’m curious to know is if there is such as thing as a standard amongst ‘the people’ so I don’t inadvertently devalue the craft. I’m looking at a bunch of sites and trying to formulate an educated perspective. I see a lot of subscriptions (meh) out there like epidemic sound and artlist.io, and then sites like AudioJungle (just wrong). SourceAudio has an example rate card, but I have no idea if the rates shown are proper.
Would love any perspectives on this, even if its to hear this is a fool’s errand
Thank you!
Stephen
U.S.I can’t find that example rate card. Maybe if you’re willing to share some of the rates you’ve come up with, people can chime in?
It’s a good and important question. Seems really difficult to figure out.
Good call, composer – I should have included that to provide context. Here are the screenshots. as I mentioned, my main thing is since I’m not very knowledgeable with this side of the business, the last thing I want to do is devalue myself and others. I’ve learned on the production side (at least for artists) to exercise patience and not be quick to make a buck by under selling yourself. I have to imagine though with all these sites selling subscriptions for $20 a month to download production music, it is having a negative impact.
Stephen
I don’t have (much) experience with sync for internal productions, apps, internet, and radio, so I can’t speak to those.
I make my living with TV placements and those rates are similar to what I see from the better production music companies I work with. Although that cable rate would apply to something like a source cue on a scripted show, not reality TV, where the sync fee is often little or nothing.
I’ve had a few national commercials and some paid quite a bit more than the rates here.
It’s tough to generalize about rates – they’re all over the map. And some composers and companies are literally (or almost) giving music away. IMO you could certainly set your rates somewhat lower than these rates without undercutting, if you think that’s the way to go.
Those composers who are advertising the “10 exclusive-rights instrumentals for $50!” are probably just looking to get their track, or ‘beat’ picked up and used in a project that becomes a hit so they will then make a ton of money – think ‘Old Town Road’ which was downloaded from Beatstars for probably next to nothing but went on to launch the career of YoungKio who created it.
I’ve had music make it to broadcast which has been downloaded from Artist – the download fee is pretty much nothing – like half a cent – but the back end royalties for some of the tracks have run into five figures, which obviously makes it worth it.
I don’t think anyone really wants to give away their music for free – I think that in the current climate some people are happy to just get the music out there and see if it can flourish on it’s own merit without putting the obstacle of a large fee in the way.
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