DOING THE BUSINESS

Big George's Guide To Commercial Success: How Much To Charge

Published in SOS September 1999
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Music Business

In the second of his regular columns on the business of making money from music, Big George considers how much money you should charge -- and spend -- on a commercial project.

After years of spending vast sums of money on gear, it's about time you earned a few quid from your talent and facilities. So how much should you charge, and how much of that fee should you spend doing the job in hand? The answer to the first part of the question is simple: you charge them as much as they're willing to pay, and if a bit of smooth talking can bump that figure up a bit, start blabbing! And as for the answer to the second part, it all depends...

Not so long ago a top composer mate of mine got a job doing the music for an ITV drama series. The commissioning fee was pretty good (about the cost of a top-of-the-range sampler) and the budget allowed for an ensemble of about 18 players for two sessions. But rather than cut as many corners as possible to make the maximum amount of money from the job, he decided to spend his entire fee, plus as much again of his own money (I told him he was crazy!) getting a much bigger section.

His reason for investing a good few months of his life composing the score and using considerable amounts of his own money doing a job for a commercial TV company was... he wanted to get into film music. He reckoned that investing his time and money into the series would give him a platform to show the studios in Hollywood what he could do. So far he hasn't scored a blockbuster movie, but he has been out there quite a few times (at a studio's expense) talking to the right people and showing them an NTSC-format VHS of the series. And he's been inundated by offers of work on British TV, with bigger budgets and healthy profits -- easily enough to wipe out the loss he made on that one job.

Whereas, at other times, it's only right and proper that you should clean up, financially speaking. A case in point would be a job I had this summer. I was asked by a major multinational corporate company to

Being Given Money     If you're setting up your own company (mine, by the way, is 'The Business Of Sound', trading as 'Big George & Sons') you have to do a 'Business Plan'. It's the only way a high street bank will give you a loan or an enterprise scheme will support you. Whether your Business Plan has any bearing on reality is another matter, but the 'suits' like to see columns with figures for projected income which all balance at the bottom of the ledger. That also goes for getting money from an Arts Funding Association or a Lottery Grant. In the future we'll be looking into all of the sources of income available to you, and how you get your hands on it. And while we're at it, we'll look at why the Tax office calls studio equipment a 'Capital Allowance'. We'll go through the joys of Self-Assessment Tax Forms, how they can work in your favour, without the need for an expensive accountant -- and why doing a meaningless Business Plan is worthwhile. And don't forget, if you have any questions, queries or quarrels with me, either write c/o SOS or email big.george@soundonsound.com.

provide an opening fanfare for their latest promotional CD-ROM. They wanted it 'big' and 'bold' and 25 seconds in total duration. Seeing as they print up millions of these things, they wanted to give me a one-off payment, rather than an amount per copy manufactured. It's none of your business, but the fee in question was £1,000.

So what did I do? Easy. I went out and bought (oops, I mean 'licensed') one of those £59.95 orchestral sample CDs, picked track two (track one was the demo), added a twinkly pad sound at the end for when the screen fizzles out, and swamped the lot in reverb. It took me a shade under two hours to complete this 'dramatic' and 'powerful' opening screen theme (and earn a whacking big profit).

Of course, when I do music for TV or the record industry, I always invest a huge proportion of the budget into the production (top musicians, good studios, expensive door-to-door couriers delivering bang on the deadline). But the reason I didn't invest the entire fee (and more) into this production was simple -- no matter how good I made the piece sound, it wasn't going to change the fact that it was just another promotional corporate CD-ROM that nobody will ever see or hear.

Was I wrong? Should I have hired some real string players and booked a top studio? How much would you have spent doing the job? It's a balance between the making the most money possible, and doing such a fabulous job that the offers will come flooding in.

Right then, I'll see you next month, and remember, one hit can make you richer than you could possibly imagine, so forget daydreaming and get on with the job in hand!