Forum Overview :: No Stairway to Heaven :: It depends.

[quote name="Fullofkittens"]Is this for a film or something? If you exclusively own the music after this, $200 is way too low. If you're just licensing music this person can use again in other contexts, for a particular use, without the ability to reuse it in other media, $200 might be equitable to the artist, especially if it's going somewhere that they can tell BMI about and get royalties from broadcast rights. To put things in context, when I was doing this for money I'd get paid $200 just to make a demo of what the finished music *could* sound like, and the person paying would be doing this with multiple composers, then they'd pay significantly more for the one that they actually wanted to use. Another piece of context is that for $200 you could also license royalty-free library music (the composers of which get paid over and over when people buy those licenses). For film composers, the guidance on what to charge usually relates to the budget for the thing being made. A friend of mine made <a href="https://www.denizhughes.com/budget-chart/">this page</a> describing a film composer's heuristic for what to charge based on a project's budget as well as other contributing factors (like licensing, whether they are delivering finished music or just writing the music and it still needs to be performed and recorded, etc). [/quote]