What am I Buying?

If you had your choice of rights to music, you’d want to own it. Not just license it. You want to put it in your project, and be able to use it for sequels. Make a trailer? You can use the music. Make a toy or novelty product, you can use the music. Create a website? Use the music. Release the soundtrack, make money off of it. The music is yours to use as you see fit, because you own it. Does a youtuber want to do a remix of your music? You can charge them mechanical royalties, or force them to come to a sync license agreement. The music is yours.

This is really the holy grail of custom music - If you had your choice, you’d choose custom music that you can own and use however you see fit, I promise.

There’s just one problem: 

That’s also pretty expensive. Like, $50-$250 per minute expensive. And that’s a lowball range. 

An established composer can charge up to $3,000 per minute of finished music.

Have you given up yet?

Well, don’t give up so soon. There are alternative agreements that can give you all the benefits of custom music (As opposed to pre-composed), but with substantially cheaper costs.

Check out these ways to pay less for custom music, and not feel bad about it. This isn’t a trick - It’s just a list of some aspects of composing that are negotiable. You can negotiate the terms of your custom music every time you hire a composer for a project - None of this is set in stone.

License the music instead of owning it.

Do you want to own the music? I’d say so. 

Do you have to? Maybe not, actually.

Maybe you can get away with just licensing the music.

But, Caleb! I can hear you protesting. Isn’t the whole point of custom music that it’s not like the pre-composed tracks from a stock library?

That’s fair. But, unlike stock-music sites that make you choose between five license agreements to find the one that’s right for you (And good luck with that. I’ve waited for an answer to my question from one of those sites for ten days, and when it arrived, it just supplied me with a link to the license agreement I had asked the question about), when working with a composer, you have other options.

You can ask that the music be sync/media exclusive. 

That means, even though you’re only licensing the music and you do not own it, the composer cannot sell that music to another movie/tv series/podcast/video game. The composer also couldn’t sell it on a pre-composed-music site. The composer would retain the rights to produce a soundtrack and make money from that. (Podcast composers in particular do this often, in my experience.)

You can ask that the music be sync/media exclusive for x amount of years, after which the music license reverts back to the composer and they can sell it again. I don’t find this option super valuable, as I don’t know any projects that would want music I’ve sold to someone else before. But, for composers that compose music for those stock-music sites, that can be an appealing arrangement that convinces them to charge less, since they’ll soon be able to “sell” it more times from the sites.

One of the concessions you make, as well, by licensing the music for a specific project, is agreeing not to use the music in a trailer or on a website or for advertising or anything without negotiating an additional license. And that really is a concession. If you make a sequel to your video game, you’d have to negotiate a separate license for it, and maybe the composer you chose is much busier now and charges higher rates. Then you’re kind of over a barrel if you want to use the music/themes from the first installment.

So maybe you put an option to purchase clause in the contract for the first project, which stipulates the right to purchase an additional license within the next x years. Maybe it stipulates the right to purchase unlimited additional licenses for the next x years. That option to purchase can cover the licenses even if you use a different composer for the second project - What you’re purchasing are the musical themes/ideas from the first project, to use in a second.

I’m not trying to give you an exhaustive list here - I just want to give you a sense of the options you have at your disposal when negotiating for custom music. If you know that this is a one-off project, you really don’t care about an option to purchase. If you’re using this music for your twitch stream, maybe you really don’t care about the music in three years, because you’ll likely have changed a lot about your brand/online presence by that point and will have a different playlist or channel theme.

What’s important is to have a sense of what you need the music for, and what you can do without. Knowing this in advance can make negotiations run more smoothly with your composer. And that good communication can be a signal to them that you’re good to deal with - Which, in itself, can be a reason a composer may charge less. 

Place the music yourself:

Some composers will let you do this. I don’t, and I explain why HERE. 

But this is a big time saver for composers, especially composers who sell pre-composed music already. They’ll be on board. There are drawbacks to this, but many composers will do it.

So, what agreement is right for me?

That’s ultimately a decision you’ll have to come to for yourself. You don’t have to have it perfectly worked out in your head. But, having some sense of what you can ask for and how it’s valued can let you operate with more confidence when discussing pricing when you hire a composer.

This isn’t an exhaustive list - Composers you pay for custom music may charge differing rates and offer different options. But hopefully this gives you a sense of the kinds of things you can ask for to make custom music work for your budget.

And, if you want to practice trying your hand at negotiating the price of custom music, and like some of the work I’ve done, feel free to reach out for a quote.