#24 HOW MUCH DO I GET PAID TO COMPOSE MUSIC?

I'm going to have to abandon this time-lapse shop this morning because this is what I usually have my coffee when it is so windy up here it is actually blowing the coffee out of my cup so I'm going to seek shelter down off the top of Crow Hill Gordon Bennett that's more like it it's amazing how literally - no that's like about 20 yards away ridiculously Windy Hill and here's a nice little spot it's going to be a bit talking today because someone came up with a brilliant idea on the YouTube channel and did keep those ideas coming because I can only do so many films about stemming about the business end of the business and I spent the whole kind of walk up top of Crow Hill this morning thinking about just advice on in egg being your own artist and artistic direction all that kind stuff but I think I'll save that for another time and concentrate just really on the map of the business end of what we do to get an insight into and not from like a massive a lister from a lack of journeyman like me someone who's bounced along the bottom of the industry mainly consensus that I've formed over the last 20 years the thing that surprises me the most about all of these courses that I visit a hundred percent of students I've ever met leave school without ever having been told how to create a business plan and I once finally had a business partner and when I suggested this to him he said I didn't get into business to do business plans which i think is incredibly ironic you have to look at what you do as not only a flouncy composer with a big cloak if you're also a head of department and you're a businessman you have to deliver these things on time and on budget another general point I want to make is I have a handyman he comes once a month and we give them a list of things to do this means I can sleep in on a Sunday safe in the knowledge that I don't have to put a piece of Ikea furniture together if I was to paint my entire house and was kind of going to give someone a really big budget and a big time scale to do an amazing job with their own ball little green paints and I went to someone I said you know I'm going to use this guy's urn so to paint my house and that person said Oh right they do kind of handyman work for our house that's interesting okay so and what's the most big budgets well so okay you're going to get the handyman to do it I think I would immediately get the fear oh god I'm gonna this guy's going to paint mine time is he the right man to do it now if I was going to turn to a friend and say listen I've got this guy he's um he's kind of quite young but check out his Instagram page he's got about 20,000 followers and he just does the most insane murals and stuff like that people got I know that's really interesting I mean it's quite a brave move to get him to paint your house but I can see that he's a real visionary therein lies I think kind of an interesting comparison between two people who may be on the same kind of income level but are just approaching it from a slightly different mindset and I think I guess this question on you the YouTube channel comes from someone who appears to me to be doing you know kind of little jobs and you know helping friends and all that kind of stuff and I would just say in a general sense that I think you know it's one direction I think that you know I believe and give me if I'm wrong hands but I believe hands in I started out by doing kind of you know handy jobs I think you did think all going for gold and so I just think when you approach it that way you need to be very aware of your career trajectory I mean no one expects out of hands are doing going for gold we all understand about putting food on your table but had he done Who Wants to Be a Millionaire after doing rain man I think it would have put him on a very different trajectory so I think if you're going to approach it from the handyman route doing lots of jobs for mates doing little freebies here and there you have to be really solid on your career trajectory we basically have two forms of income one is upfront fees and the other is back-end and there are two rights to the back end as well all of these things are under attack it is a simple fact that to get what you need you really have to fight for it if you do not value what you do people aren't going to value it on your behalf so you have to be really careful about working for free you have to be really careful about favors because people simply do not respect you for them I develop my career on this kind of myth that basically if you make friends with a director he's going to take you all away it just doesn't happen that way or it happens very rarely and I think it's very dangerous to be killing yourself to director to the director to see you can use of the director to see you completely spanking your entire budget on a massive Orchestra and all that cause they just respect you less so basically where my career's concerned which is based solely in Britain really pretty much and did some stuff in France as well I look at between 1,000 pounds and 10,000 pounds per half an hour of air time now that's not music that's half an hour a half an hour episode of X or half an hour of an hour and a half feature so where you're looking at like a big kind of period dramas and stuff if you're looking at something I don't know it's an hour-and-a-half feature you know anything between ten and thirty thousand pounds you look at stuff like I think those things like Doctor Who Downton all of that kind stuff are the fees massive on those well I don't know it's difficult because when they start making them they don't know that they're going to be this massive international hit it's all based around a framework of that kind of between a thousand ten thousands per half-hour now this is kind of tends to be package deals which basically means that this is your fee and what you're going to spend on musicians and many many people like myself at the beginning of their careers happily spunk all of their fee on big orchestras and all of that kind of stuff I really question the need to do that to prove to yourself that you can work with Orchestra great absolutely to have an amazing experience of working an orchestra yet yet do it but to build up a show reel of orchestral material it just all sounds the same to directors even if you're kind of harmonic language is different to say someone who's doing come lots of ostinatos and hybrid stuff if you have a table full of compact discs that show my age or a bunch of we transfer links to 15 composers who are creating orchestral music with big old orchestras it to the average director all sounds the same so I would say invest more in finding your own voice so I mean this may sound kind of you know fairly reasonable one thousand ten thousand pounds you know somewhere in between maybe five thousand pounds per half-hour I do six six part series you know that's so quite a quite a good chunk of change but not if that's the only thing you're going to do that year and I think this is where the real kind of doing a business plan is absolutely crucial because what tends to happen is people stack up the amount of work they do and I was basically until about two years ago doing about 30 jobs a year and when I decided because of this amazing opportunity called Spitfire to actually dial it back a bit and simply work with the people I like working with stop working with narcissists and stop working on stuff that didn't lead to anywhere stopped working on kind of mainly stop working on feature films because what would happen I'd do them they'd be brilliant and then show at nine screens no one would see them no never heard of them and it just simply wasn't leading to anything but my accountant still argued that I was earning a very good living out of composing it really wasn't was that the right thing to do about two months ago I went into his office and he said I don't understand you have basically chopped off the amount of work you're doing by 90 percent but you're making ten percent more and the reason for that is if you're going to stack up 30 jobs a year you need a lot of help need assistance help you track lay sessions because you don't have time to do it you tend to rely more on musicians because then you don't have spent hours kind of really programming and working up your own stuff you can just go write that string pad sounds great okay flink to the orchestrator Orchestrator things it to the cockiest copyist and my assistant gets everything ready for the session tracking engineer does it and then what's-his-name can mix it great this really costs a lot of money and I think the easiest way to calculate this is basically every professional you have in that chain will charge you roughly a thousand pounds for every half hour of air time that you create it's a really kind of broad mean average but basically that's what it works out your assistant will work with you 200 pounds a day for at least five days your engineer will charge you a day day and a half's work to mix it'll take a day to track your Orchestrator of charge you a thousand pounds your copy of charge of a thousand pounds etc etc yet musicians is a very general sense you should look at between fifty and a hundred pounds per man per hour specialist musicians really they want to earn a thousand pounds a day so if you're going to take them for half a day you should pay them about five hundred pound and your fixer will charge you 10% of whatever the musicians are earning if you get a conductor again it's going to charge you about a thousand pounds for about half an hour airtime which I think you should look at air time as these days it tends to be warm or about between 15 and 20 minutes of music four per half an hour of air time and most of these use in Steel's are you can put them for a minimum of three hours and you can record about 25 minutes in music with the most free asset everything is kind of structured around units of half an hour of airtime so that's your your income from your fees and your outgoings on on your production and what can you expect from the backend is absolutely crucial to our survival and I just beg you to protect it with everything you have we basically have two rights we have the physical recordings otherwise known as the mechanical rights and we have the publishing rights now the mechanical right those tend to be up for grabs basically because the production is paying for the recordings therefore the production owns the recordings so you can fight for mechanical rights it's basically mean if you do say Downton Abbey and you have in chemical rights you will earn money off DVD sales which is kept potentially for the next 10 20 years a massive thing this will also mean that anytime that your music or recordings are exploited for secondary usage you will get an additional fee but these things they're not worth walking off a job for because they're quite a rarity to get these days simply because production paper recordings production owns and recordings there is another thought on this though that if you are doing these things for your mates where basically you're spanking your entire fee on production musicians or all that kind of stuff I would question who owns the recordings do you or do they and I think if you are going to do the handyman work where you're going to be working for mates for free if you can actually own the recordings and say I'm basically licensing these to you but I get to put them on a map on my own I get to offer them up for other TV shows or library companies then that by far is the strongest route to take and there is actually one guy there's a hugely successful composer who's essentially and very rapid over the last five years and he always maintained his rights he basically owned his mornings and he gave them to these companies to use and you can offer them a bit of exclusivity so it's not you know being shown on everything anyway waffleh waffleh waffleh so the other right is that is the more important one which is the publishing and in written currently it is the law that you retain at least 50% or the writers share of that publishing basically a hundred percent is up for grabs and a publisher will take a percentage of publishers share which could be no more than fifty that publisher can be you but more often not it'll be an affiliate to the TV or broadcaster so say for example with the BBC it may be BBC Worldwide now because BBC is a kind of public entity they cannot coerce you into giving away these publishing rights other broadcaster other production companies actively coerce you say basically the publishing is not up for discussion on this we will take 50% or rather the the publishing companies we're affiliated and we'll hope to secondary exploit that further down the line whether they do or not some companies are excellent some companies are just absolutely rubbish it all that with your 50% publishing share how much can you expect to earn out of your back end the biggest earners are worldwide hits and those are very rare things especially when you're based in Britain you know we've got our doctor who's our Sherlock's our Downton Abbey's I did Top Gear unfortunately and write the theme tune although it's you know I did the theme tune that I'm sure he's earning the Allman Brothers a lot of money 300 million viewers all of that country so they're your top earners the next step down I would say is as a kind of guarantee is factual entertainment based on terrestrial channels in the UK so things like cooking programs DIY programs stuff that is scored through with your music kind of bubbling away day after day week after week those will make you an absolute fortune the next down from that our TV franchises so when you get something's like I'd you know I did well out of a thing called fresh meat which went into four seasons or I did two pints log and a packet of crisps which they get about 70 episodes of that the next down from that I would say are series drama series primetime we'll learn you quite well but as we go further down the line you're you know talking about event TV so if you do a kind of a TV feature like I did the go-between you weren't a good single chunk out of that working all the way down to feature films now we always put feature films up in these kind of lofty hikes but British independent feature films will not earn you any money because they show at nine screens for one week it just it pennies it really is I've never really earned anything out of these things soundtrack albums literally I think I've got about 20 albums on iTunes I've done about 50 film schools and my total net earnings from albums is zero streaming also it's a very poor so what you basically got to aim for if you're looking at the best possible back end earning is stuff that is played regularly on terrestrial channels the terrestrial channels in Britain are BBC one BBC two ITV channel four and Channel five these basically log every single piece of music that's played and will pay you between 50 and maybe a hundred pounds a minute depending on what time of day it's shown any other channel basis it on a sample and what battle often be is say for example Sky will pay out X amount per week as part of their blanket agreement into PRS and what it basically happen is PRS will request one random day a week and will basically payout seven times what people would use yearn from that blank agreement basically based on the fact that you've hit that sample so if you're doing a factual TV series which shows five days a week say for example a cooking show then the likelihood of you hitting that sample is greater earnings from stuff like Sky Netflix but from what I know it's very very minimal so you've got to aim for the terrestrials and I would say on average again working in these kind of these units of half an hour of airtime on average I would say earns me about three thousand pounds maybe on average here maybe between two and three thousand pounds a year and it has a tail off so backhand is something you really need to protect because really the upfront fees as I've described difficult to kind of come out that in profit because they're a package deal so you really need to protect the back end and you need to understand where the earnings are coming from and if you're doing endless favors for mates on kind of obscure satellite channels not only are people are not going to see them you're just not going to earn any money ask them and this is where I come back to the original point is you are running a business so I really look at doing a business plan work out is this going to earn me any money is it going to earn me any rewards is anyone going to see it and is it good for where I currently sit within my career trajectory have I just been nominated for an Oscar for Rain Man should I do that cooking show for the satellite channel I would say not because you're going to have to hire assistants to help you do it your outgoings are going to increase and your career trajectory is going to go down I think that's the thing I would recommend just don't on your own IMDB page I've done this so many times there's been times where it's like that's a work of art nominated for an Ivor Novello at that that was nominated for a BAFTA that won a BAFTA not me director did probably that's really cool that's got a French Foreign name and showed in thousands of screens in France and then I do Richard Hammonds blast lad

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 93,537

Rating: 4.9745083 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques, how much do composers get paid, media composition how much to charge

Id: WEyCf_ZcwgM

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2017