How much Should I Charge For the Production Of a Song?
Song producers are responsible for the creative outcome and planning side of a song’s production process. That brings great responsibility and this responsibility should also be compensated.
But how much should you charge for the production of a song?
Here is what I know from a lot of feedback from songwriters and producers:
Song producers make anywhere from $750 up to around $35000 per song or more. Experience, recognition of the produced artist, and negotiation skills affect the paid fee the most. A producer’s fee is composed of the front-end fee or advance, publishing royalties, and production points.
But there is a lot more to get into about song producers and their fees.
So in this article, we’re diving deep into the world of song producers. We’ll see how to come up with a great fee for your productions, compare how much song producers make, on average, and how that differs in cities in the US.
Let’s get going!
What do producers typically charge for a song?
A music producer in most cases is a freelancer and has to be creatively and artistically top notch and has all the responsibilities of a business owner.
So that means, there is a lot more pressure on them than if they had a full-time position let’s say as assistant to a producer or in a publishing company.
This added pressure should add up in terms of dollars, shouldn’t it?
Let’s see!
On average, a music producer in the US makes $52,966/year according to Glassdor.com.
But there’s a lot that factors into that, such as:
Location
Experience/Credits
Freelance/Full-time position
Factor 1: Location
Some freelance producers in Los Angeles have to demand much higher fees according to e.g. the cost of living. By comparison, a producer in a small town, with a much lower cost of living can afford to have lower rates.
Bear in mind too, it’s hard to get exact numbers from independent, freelance producers, that aren’t employed by a bigger production or publishing company. There are no reporting requirements, nor are freelance producer salaries listed on sites like GlassDoor.
According to GlassDoor, this is what music producers earn per year in different cities:
Factor 2: Experience
Another factor is the experience a producer has already gained over his career. Experience according to Collins English Dictionary is determined by the knowledge and skill in a particular job or activity, you have gained because you have done that job or activity for a long period of time.
So, the longer you worked as a music producer the more experience you have. Gained experience more often than not leads to higher rates as a producer. The question, “How long have you done that for?” is probably the most common question asked by a client before hiring any freelancer.
And then there are “Credits”. Put in simple terms, credits show who you have already worked for as a producer. If your credit list is long, that means, you can produce a song from start to finish and have multiple people already trust you. The extensiveness of a credit list is not the only factor, though. If you produced songs for a Top 100 song you probably don’t even need a very long list at all.
Factor 3: Freelance vs. Employed
As a freelancer, the amount you charge for a song needs not only to reflect your creative input and administrative work around the production but also the overhead like the cost of running your business and profit.
As an employee, you have only so much say in what the company charges for the production. Depending on the salary model, you might be compensated for the success of a song or not. But generally, your salary doesn’t reflect directly on how much is charged per song.
How to Determine what to Charge for a Song?
But how do I know what to charge as a freelancer? The range is very large there. Yes, I know and I hear you. Been there myself.
There are 3 distinct ways to charge an artist for the production of their song. And I heard many, many different methods to come up with a price for song production. This section will go deeper into the 3 most common methods and explain which one is best.
Gut-based-pricing 😉
Let’s be honest, we all have a gut feeling when it comes to pricing our work. Even though it might be not the most reliable trusting only our gut.
But sometimes when asked for a price, we need to give one quickly. In this method, we use our gut to determine the price of our product.
I know, not very scientific or even proven to be very effective, but if you have nothing else it is quite user-friendly because you can make this kind of calculation I am about to show you instantly when asked how much you charge.
This method takes whatever price you have in mind, double it and add 30%
Example:
Let’s say you talk to an artist and get asked how much you charge.
You think 400$.
Don’t say it, just think and calculate.
Double the number: 800$ and now ad 30% –
é voila, 1040$.
Cost-based pricing
This model is probably the most used in the industry. Take what you need to live, add a little profit on top and then charge the client the respective amount either per hour or project. This is an absolutely valid method to price your productions, but consider this:
Hourly pricing
When pricing your work on an hourly rate, you will make more when you work more. That is a good thing, right? But, think about this:
The day has only so many hours. Your maximum revenue is simply capped by the hours in a year. You have no control over that metric
The better and faster your get with your productions the less you get paid. Or you up your rate, which instantly gets you in a discussion like “But it only cost this much last time? Why do you charge double now?
The focus of you and the client is much more on the hours spent (more hours mean more money for you, but the higher cost for the artist) rather than the valuable, creative outcome of the project.
Project-flat fees
For most of my projects, I tried to price on a per-project basis.
If you work faster, you are making more money
You have to be very good at knowing the scope of a project beforehand. So you need at least some experience
If you don’t factor in time for revision time and make your client aware of how many and what kind of revisions are included the scope of the project likely gets blown by your client.
Value-based pricing
The difference of value-based pricing compared to the 2 methods mentioned above is what we focus on.
Value-Based-Pricing focuses on the outcome, the value for the client, rather than your needs and circumstances. You are serving your client and don’t sell to them anymore.
One simple method to get started with value-based pricing is to get into the Why Conversation with your client.
(I kindly borrow this term from Jonathan Stark here. He has a great podcast and Youtube channel, well worth listening to as a creative freelancer. Here is a link to an article of his)
The idea is to find out why they wanna do this project and what value they see in this?
Ask these 3 questions first and go from there:
Why do you wanna produce this song?
Why do you want to work with me?
Why is this a priority now?
I know, this feels kind of scary and almost as if I wanted to not work with this artist.
And yes, this is partially true. But in my experience, this helps to get rid of the artists that just want someone, anyone cheap to the hard work for them, rather than me. And secondly, it helped tremendously with scaling my rates.
Did I cover everything you wanted to know about how much to charge for a song production?
In this article, we took a deep-dive look into the world of rates for song productions.
We examined salaries based on location, and how they compare to freelance rates, and what else is going into this calculation.
And ultimately answered the question of how to determine what to charge for that.
