Sound designer wages

[Sami]

Hello,

I'm about to do some sound design for multimedia / 3d company. My work will include doing a full musical piece for their demonstration video (5 min or so) and some sound effects and some other little musical pieces.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to price my work, so if somebody could give me some guidelines I would be very very grateful. I imagine somebody here has worked in a field like this before

[Sami]

Anybody? I have to give the prices this week...

[Krakatau]

Maybe you should have choosen the market place forum for this thread ?

[manytone]

No this is the right forum for this.
Market place is for selling Gear and software etc.


I can suggest what i do
I give an option to either buy the music outright for exclusive use ... and depending on the licence / terms of use, the price could vary here greatly.
Example
A Small business wants a tune to play at a convention or company meeting...or a presentation and only want to play for small audience a few times.
I will licence an existing original piece for as little as $20 for that.
But if it was a movie company or other company that wanted the tune for a larger audience or exclusive then licensing would be much higher.

In your case you are custom writing the tune not licensing an existing song (I have an archive of my own songs - jingles that i consider quick ready to license material and thereby am reasonable on the pricing) ... you need to ask yourself how long it will take you to do what they want from scratch and then average an hourly fee that you are comfortable with.
There is your quote.
Depending on the size of company and their audience again may be a factor in the final price.

I think alot of guys will average about a week of time for a jingle type song. But this varies ... and
there is guys out there now adays that can Bang em out in no time with the current technology!

sorry i can't be more specific but i hope this helps.
paul

[Sami]

Thanks Manytone! That helps a lot.
It will be an exclusive license for them and they have all the rights to use the songs in any way they want or even modify it.

It's not a very big company, just starting out really. They will be giving out the presentation video on their website and also showing the videos at internal and public meetings.

I will count the price I'll ask according to an hourly fee and how much time I've spent on the music.

Thanks again.

[manytone]

Also..
this is by no means a standard.. It is just what I offer myself to my potential clients.
don't sell yourself short
try and get an idea of their Budget from them too ..if you can. You can say you need this so you can figure out your amount of input and time you can commit to the project.
paul

[Forever Sun]

Also..

don't sell yourself short

paul

I'm an expert at doing that .
I'm producing a double CD project for a client. After the (live) recording session, the guy asks: "will you compose some music as well?". Shure ! I said.
Copletely forgetting to negotiate the price ! Right now, I'll have to offer it free as a taster of what I can do ( for future projects) or tactfully ask for some money ( I'm soo bad at this !).

Anyway. I have a link to this company that specialises in this subject, I need to find it,so gimme some time....

[Forever Sun]

Well, I can't find that link, but I've found something else. http://www.filmmusicmag.com/faq/7.1.html .
However, this gives $ guidelines for big projects so it might not be that suitable ?

[IIRs]

Going rate = as much as you can squeeze out of the bastards!

Basically you have to try to suss out how much they want to spend: quote too high and you lose the job. too low and you lose money (you might even lose the job if you quote much too low, as they will assume you are amateur!)

Personally I find these bits much harder than making the music itself..

[lo3q]

Manytone's advice sounds very good to me. Beware of going too cheap, because people will assume you're inexperienced (probably true), desperate for work (maybe so), and unskilled (hopefuly not).

Also, consider how much benefit the client will get from your work. Note that most serious clients want to save time... they want things done right first time, with a minimum of hassle, and they don't want to waste time haggling over $50.

One slightly different approach that might help you get a very rough starting figure is: consider how much money you would earn if you used the time to do other non-musical work.

But, bear in mind that if you haven't done much professional/deadline work before, you'll probably increase your working speed 5x or even 10x with a few months of experience.

And you could also try asking at the futureproducers.com forums. There are a few helpful and knowledgable people there (and quite a lot of others, too ). Perhaps the 'Scoring and Orchestration' forum...

[Forever Sun]

I read the original post again. You do sound design, and not composition. My link not useful then.