When trying to negotiate an agreement as an audio contractor, it’s important to know your ideal conditions. Contracts often contain compromises, and so it is important to know where you are flexible. If you can find projects you are passionate about, you may find that contractual deliberations go smoother by default.
Always Have a Contract
I once hired someone I knew for a long time to collaborate with me on some music for a project that was a work for hire. In my haste and naïvete we never put together a subcontractor's agreement for rights assignment, and later on they decided in bad faith that they wanted to challenge the right of the client to use the music. The client, out of fear of breaching their own contracts with other parties, put all their indemnity on me. We ultimately had to replace the music we wrote, which I also had to pay for. As you can imagine, this ended up costing me quite a lot of money. I never thought something like that could happen, but Murphy's law reared its ugly head. From them on, I've always made sure to have a contract. Let this be a lesson to you!
The Speculative Wizard
It’s important to gather as much info about a project as possible up front, and then speculate about the outcome of the project before you even lay out contractual terms. How much work do you estimate will be needed? Do you think this project will be financially successful? What will the schedule be like, and how convenient or inconvenient will it be? The answers to these questions can all affect your cost. If you feel the project is destined for greatness, you might consider asking for a revenue share (typically called ’back end’ in the film industry). If you’re less certain, or you need money to live on in the present, it can be better to ask for a higher fee up front. There is no shortage of options and variations when it comes to negotiating a contract.
Self-Worth
One of the many considerations in coming up with an asking price is estimating the value of your work as a part of the greater whole. Music sometimes comes together very quickly, regardless of its quality. The contributions of coworkers may take far longer to execute and be of a different level of importance to the success of the project. There is no cut and dry method in regards to estimating the worth of sound to a project. Either way, this is a complex, subjective issue that deserves careful thought.
What's the Budget?
It’s never a bad idea to ask if there’s a budget. Sometimes, especially when working with larger companies, you may find that their opening offer is already higher than yours.
Gambling With Your Time
You may find a great project to work on that either has no budget or is non-commercial, like a student film for instance. If you have the bandwidth, feel strongly, and think the project could garner lots of attention, a pro-bono project can be a great career move. Sometimes, a commercial project may not have a budget, but there is the possibility of revenue later.
Being a freelancer is all about relationships. Working purely for a revenue share is an act of faith and investment in the success of a project. It may not yield any financial rewards, but your colleagues will appreciate your generosity and belief in them, and it may solidify your relationships with those people. You may find yourself working with them again in the future.
Rights
There are many secondary sources of income that can arise from a work commission. Some of the most common are soundtrack sales, licensing, and royalties from music ownership. It's not always possible, but I often try to keep the rights to my music, as well as the majority of proceeds from soundtrack sales. These can be great ways to pad your income on a project, and they also provide you with more options when it comes to finding ways to strike a deal with your client. For instance, on a project with a small budget where you're receiving a low flat rate, you could ask for full ownership of your music as a supplement. This would also give you the option to exploit your music in the future, potentially generating more income should others wish to use, stream or perform it.
Regarding whether or not you want to try to keep rights at all, I tend to think about a few different questions:
- Will your client plan to exploit the music beyond what it was written for?
- Will they know how to exploit it ? There are many potential income streams for music: distribution, licensing, performance royalties, neighboring rights, etc.
- Do I have some plan for what I want to do with the music beyond the project? ie. For me, I like to be able to put all my music up in one place, on Bandcamp. Sometimes, not having the music rights prevents me from doing so.
- Is it even reasonable to expect that the rights are on the table ? Big companies rarely yield on ownership of anything - so it may be a waste of time to push back when you're dealing with a company that has never allowed a composer to keep the rights to the music. In general, you’re more likely to keep rights on a project with a smaller company / group.
- Is the client paying a lot in order to keep the rights ? Sometimes, especially if you consider the overhead associated with trying to exploit and manage a collection of music over its entire lifetime, it might be more palatable to take the money. This is why many famous musicians have sold the rights to their catalogues in recent years.
- And lastly, the least palatable, but most realistic question, which is: how badly do I want the gig?
For me, the inability to keep rights is not a "non-starter". I find that it depends on the situation.
Keeping rights also tends to coincide with your client(s) having to account to you (ie. royalties) on a regular basis. As I’ve gotten older, I have more sympathy for the overhead involved in these periodic payouts - but there are ways to set up licensing that minimize overhead. You can still take a flat rate on a license deal, or you can offer to stretch the required accounting period to be once or twice a year, instead of every month or quarter.
Crowdfunding
There are times when asking the public to help fund your involvement in a project is a possibility. I have seen successful Kickstarters whose sole purpose was to pay certain team members, such as composers or sound designers. A project you are looking to join may already be running a Kickstarter to raise money for its development. They might consider including the expense of your services as part of their crowdfunding goal.