I was just wondering, since I''m working on some music now, what a fair price per minute for music is. The music I work on is generally techno-ish in theme, done through a MIDI synthesizer keyboard.

All I can say is that I just was reading an article I found at GameDev by Marcus Knudsen concerning music in games. Read it at http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article904.asp
Hope that gets you somewhere.

Previously, I have never charged per minute, more based on how long I estimated the song would take me to complete. I don''t think the tactic of a sum of money per minute of music is used very often. More the number of hours it took you to make.

Anyway.... that''s it for me.

Hope I helped out.

cya,

Bassie

Face your pain, it''''s the purest truth

Actually, Bassie, charging per produced minute of music is commonly accepted as the standard in pricing. At least it''s the standard in the US and UK. The idea is that one minute of music costs you so much time and effort in planning, compostion, performance, production, recording, mixing, mastering.. All of that adds up to a figure. Other factors go into the bid, of course, such as how many total minutes you''re delivering, delivery format, and style of music.

If a developer is buying a lot of music, you can then cut them a break on the per minute price. Or if they need the end result simply in .wav or .mp3 format, that''s easier than dealing with MODs, DirectMusic or MIDI/SF2 files. (That''s a whole other bag of worms, because you''re dealing with preparing legal custom samples which should be charged separately.)

Style of music is an important factor. I think anyone would agree that it''s more work to produce a minute of classical orchestral music than it is to produce a minute of something more repetitive like techno. Thus the per minute price should reflect that. And this is where charging based on hourly labor can get complicated and difficult to defend. A developer, who doesn''t know about music but "knows what he likes", will listen to a techno piece and say, "But it''s just the same thing over and over. You just cut-n-pasted!" Believe me, it happens. It then becomes very difficult to convince him that it took more than two hours to produce that piece of music. And to a small extent, he''s right. Loop-based music is easier to produce than some Hollywood-sounding tense action score. And if you tell him that the techno piece and the film score piece each took the same amount of planning and effort to produce, he''s going to say, "Forget the techno stuff, give me an entire Hollywood score at this payrate." And now you''re losing money.

Edward, good luck on finding a score for your strategy game.


Ed Lima - ELM&M
ed@edlima.com
http://www.edlima.com