The big problem with not charging by the hour, or capping your services in some way is that you might end up with projects that are never finished. Nothing like the budget running out to make an artist commit to a finished product, instead of forever tinkering.
Honestly as someone whos a artist and really pushes myself, and watching friends who are artists really not push themselves, never do free shit for ppl. Charge really low if u want but u have to introduce the thought of money into the equation at some point bc a lotta ppl talk behind ppls backs and dont wanna tell them that they have no want to be a musician or that theyre never going to release the music they do. Money talks. U can immediately get the real answer if someone takes their music seriously if you shoot a lowball number out there. I wish I would have done that 10 years ago before I wasted so much time on ppl who really dont give a shit if they waste your time bc they just wanna “hang out”. I personally wanna make money from music. Im an adult, I dont wanna just hang out.
I had a similar situation a while back.. Did a free project with a diva-ish vocalist. After handing over the mix, I thought it was done. But then the guy started calling EVERY DAMN DAY demanding adjustments to the previous mix I sent him the day before.. After a week of this, I sent him the individual tracks and ghosted!
I don't think this applies to me.. which sucks, I really wanted advice. But I opened my studio in 2004 and work with so many artist. and sadly 95% of them have never seen 20,000 streams let alone lone the 150 Million streams to go platinum. Before 2 years ago, I had at least 8-10 hourly sessions a week. normally between 6-10 hours a day of sessions. and now.. I'm lucky to get 4 sessions in a week. My studio is dying and I'm not too sure how to fix it. I'm going to figure something out though.
Are you a humble, fun and cool guy to tak to? do you share the music that ppl make at your studio? Do u try and get hype around them? Ppl stop doing music when they realize they arent making money, if u arent helping them get popularity then they arent gonna make any money n then be able to pay u anymore. Using money from their main job becomes an endless cycle of throwing money down the drain, its supposed to be cyclical.
Absolutely never heard of this and ive been in the restaurant industry for 15 years. New restaurants actually have to have SOFT openings bc so many ppl are knocking down the doors to new places. No free shit ever.
I really loved this video and the conversation around this topic. If you look hard we can anticipate where the industry is headed as more and more artists are choosing to be independent, record themselves, produce their own songs and learn from YOU
You must live on a different planet than the rest of us! If you offer someone free work they will never offer you money and of course they will keep coming back cause they just suckered you. The other problem is some of those artists might not make a drop of money so where is your royalty? You do royalty jobs if your working with a preexistent big band that is making money.
I agree on this one! I actually negotiate royalties with the artist even if there’s a budget in place. Long term, we both win and short them we win too. Long term: if the song is great and it’s promoted well, there will be some royalties which we’ll both get. Short term: the artist gets the song they want, and I get paid for the actual work of recording, editing, mixing, etc.
I don't think there is anymore music being made and published then there was before hundreds of thousands of records released before the social media and Spotify was a thing. The costs of CD production and advertising it still costs money to get anywhere. The people dominating streaming are the same people who would in the past and that is how much money they got.
if a record sells 1,000,000 copies at $7-$10, that does not make the artist 7-10 Million. First, you take 7%-14% of that as the artists share. Then you deduct any expenses incurred off the top of that 7%-14% for that huge recording budget, touring costs, promotion, Video production... all comes out of the artists share before any so-called profit is generated. Depending on how creative the label is on calculating expenses (flights, dinners, phone calls, lawyers, you name it) all get paid out of the 7%-14% of the artists share before the artist breaks even" and begins to generate any royalties. The artists made most of their money off of touring and merchandising (selling T shirts). and Mechanical royalties which the label cannot claim against (about 10 cents per song, per album). Since the 2000s the sinking labels initiated the "360" deal in which entitles the label to a substantial portion of ALL those aforementioned revenues.
Interesting conversation, I don't think I've been engineering long enough to speak on this. All I can say is that client acquisition is really difficult for someone just starting out. Hope everyone who reads this finds something that makes them happy.
Nobody whos not also a artist should be engineering. Its useless. There should be artists/engineers and then basically what im starting to call REPAIRMEN. Repairmen are the ppl who are the autistic ppl who can repair equipment and should never be around people. We all know who these ppl are by the forums and videos. Ppl who run studios need to be good with ppl bc its a service industry. The guys who can repair equipment usually should have been in a different field but got into music bc they thought they liked music and electronics but never thought about dealing with the ppl who make music and frequent studio. Mixing engineers ARE artists and every artist should have a scene theyre going for n thats where ur clients should be.
1 Million Streaming, is not Platinum! Platinum needs to equate to the same income generated to sales sold from a tangle medium. This is crazy, get 1 million streams and you made $3000 on TH-cam. Platinum sales of an album generated closer to 10-40 Million Dollars for a label but their budget was also in the millions, most artists made 1%-3% of that so unless they went 4x Platinum the artist still didn't make a million dollars unless you're Prince who got more off his music than most artists and learned to make videos and movies to capitalize on the music like Taylor Swift! I'd only consider royalties if a major label is projecting a large artist, with modern marketing pursuits beyond making 15 TH-cam videos per song, and the probability they're going to use you, good luck with that, do you have a Chris Lord-Alge mix room, with 15 of every best piece of gear? Unless the album will still be sold at Target & Walmart, and whatever other music stores, get your max money upfront. Streaming has dissolved the value of new release music. We need to get back to a tangle medium. In the 90's we bought an entire album for $12-16 for just for 1 or 2 songs we liked. We need better data, on current market income models. Build a brand of what you want to do, which like anything you work a lot for close to no income and when you're so busy there's more work than you can get done, you raise your rates over and over. I wish you all the best! Make 10 videos for anything you're working on or proud of, then make sound packs for random crap you make, try to sell everything you are and make a video on why it's good. 10 points negotiated on an independent artist I'd only do that if there's a history record of what the sales project "should be," all depends on how good their marketing campaigns are etc, nothing is guaranteed, there's no MTV nor radio (radio still plays 90's music, sad), nor stores to see/hear new music releases, nor music magazine (Vibe, Rollingstone etc to see new major label artists). Royalty engineer game is nice, but only works when things are actually done with majors and lawyers, most music mixers aren't getting paid using lawyers. A subscription model for mixing sounds interesting, I'd like to know how to manage that. Sounds like more work for less income like streaming, artists constantly wanting mix updates when adding new tracked vocals 10x a month for the same song.
Studio time will always be a thing. If you are making a beat dont sell the rights to your copyright .I make 45-60 an hour recording. I charge 45 an hour for consulting
Any real artist is gonna require you sell them the exclusive rights to a beat meaning they own it 100% unless theyre just buying a lease. Most producers wont even promote the song after that either so its really not even worth it to buy exclusives from ppl anymore. With how poorly ppl in the “music business” handle actual business, might as well just steal beats from ppl again, distokid wont even take em down lol
For Pop music or Electronic music I think it can work. Maybe Hip Hop as well, but it really depends on the genre IMO. I had this conversation with Adam Nolly Getgood at GuitarSummit and for him it's the opposite for Metal and Rock. He told me he raised his mixing and producing fix fees and doesn't ask for royalties anymore, even as a producer because it's not worth it anymore. Your long term investments doesn't have to be music, you can take that money that you made right now and invest in other industries or real estate or auctions or whatever.
Independently, yes. Corporately, no, for now. So a select few hourly recording studios will continue to thrive based on expertise and relationship but eventually these large desk format studios will go the way of the dodo as corporations adopt their own recording facilities. That’s a really fun job waiting to happen for some employee who would be psyched to run a state of the art recording facility for 24 bucks an hour saving the company many thousands of dollars on 3rd party A-room fees over time. The initial investment may be hefty but over time pays for itself.
Sure, this is not new at all - been done for decades. I used to get work for 'free 'coz I be famuss in da weak' (sic) demands every day. I never touch that. I'm not doing deals with anyone who has no serious label deal. Otherwise, I do huge amounts of work for people who don't have the right raw material, assume I will spend 20+ hours (plus all the shouting - seeing they did not do what I said was needed to get a workable result) when it should have been 8-10 hours. Further, they never do the work to get even a basic audience. Might as well kill monsters. This is poor advice for the kinds of Level 0 people watching these videos as they have nothing to offer and get the impression that the studio people's time should not be worth the already depressed value so they think they can make these demands or the common $15 for a $150 mix. No one wins from that. Sure it is fine if Green Day comes to me with points but not for MC Jizzy Shizzer who has nothing going on at all. :-)
@@papertiger9845 Well, that's a pretty demeaning thing to say. But true enough as I became a McWorker several years ago and earn more money for less time, and get better respect from crew & customers. Sad that all my skills and experience are lost but that is the choice that the world made.
From My possition as someone who is a good producer composer but a hit and miss kinda when I mix and master. Sometimes My stuff just works great and other times it's so difficult to get a production master to sound good I just end up leaving it. I have music that's bigger then I can finish so to finish these I'm going to have to send them to a mixing engender but they are expensive for Me to send them a full albums worth of music to master for Me will cost at least 4k and then what? I'm not a artist so now I have to lease them and might never get My money back? Post them My self on Spotify despite not being a artist? It's all a headache for Me make Me want to quit music.
Haha Im just getting my home studio almost done Ive been slowly working on here and there for 2 years now I can do everything I can do at a studio but on my own time, and in my own crib without the hasstle of smalltalk with lames who tryna make a living aha lowkey home studios is worth it if you serious about it... and u dont need a damn studio u can legit record in a corner of the room with a towel or in a car.. the real spill is learning how to do everything on the computer.... most hits u know now a days are recorded in hotel rooms.... ask me any questions
The big problem with not charging by the hour, or capping your services in some way is that you might end up with projects that are never finished. Nothing like the budget running out to make an artist commit to a finished product, instead of forever tinkering.
Honestly as someone whos a artist and really pushes myself, and watching friends who are artists really not push themselves, never do free shit for ppl. Charge really low if u want but u have to introduce the thought of money into the equation at some point bc a lotta ppl talk behind ppls backs and dont wanna tell them that they have no want to be a musician or that theyre never going to release the music they do. Money talks. U can immediately get the real answer if someone takes their music seriously if you shoot a lowball number out there.
I wish I would have done that 10 years ago before I wasted so much time on ppl who really dont give a shit if they waste your time bc they just wanna “hang out”. I personally wanna make money from music. Im an adult, I dont wanna just hang out.
I had a similar situation a while back.. Did a free project with a diva-ish vocalist. After handing over the mix, I thought it was done. But then the guy started calling EVERY DAMN DAY demanding adjustments to the previous mix I sent him the day before.. After a week of this, I sent him the individual tracks and ghosted!
I don't think this applies to me.. which sucks, I really wanted advice. But I opened my studio in 2004 and work with so many artist. and sadly 95% of them have never seen 20,000 streams let alone lone the 150 Million streams to go platinum. Before 2 years ago, I had at least 8-10 hourly sessions a week. normally between 6-10 hours a day of sessions. and now.. I'm lucky to get 4 sessions in a week. My studio is dying and I'm not too sure how to fix it. I'm going to figure something out though.
Dang bro I really felt this one. Heart goes out to you man.
Are you a humble, fun and cool guy to tak to? do you share the music that ppl make at your studio? Do u try and get hype around them? Ppl stop doing music when they realize they arent making money, if u arent helping them get popularity then they arent gonna make any money n then be able to pay u anymore. Using money from their main job becomes an endless cycle of throwing money down the drain, its supposed to be cyclical.
If you are a new restaurant that hasn’t made any money yet, you don’t give away free food. The quality of a person’s work should determine the pay.
Actually many restaurants do that.
@ Name them and give the location.
@@DanteWilliams728😂
Absolutely never heard of this and ive been in the restaurant industry for 15 years. New restaurants actually have to have SOFT openings bc so many ppl are knocking down the doors to new places. No free shit ever.
Disagree with you on this one but keep doing your thing😊
Lol
Please explain WHY instead. Just saying : «I disagree» is not very informative for the rest of the human kind….
I really loved this video and the conversation around this topic. If you look hard we can anticipate where the industry is headed as more and more artists are choosing to be independent, record themselves, produce their own songs and learn from YOU
You must live on a different planet than the rest of us! If you offer someone free work they will never offer you money and of course they will keep coming back cause they just suckered you. The other problem is some of those artists might not make a drop of money so where is your royalty? You do royalty jobs if your working with a preexistent big band that is making money.
I agree on this one!
I actually negotiate royalties with the artist even if there’s a budget in place.
Long term, we both win and short them we win too.
Long term: if the song is great and it’s promoted well, there will be some royalties which we’ll both get.
Short term: the artist gets the song they want, and I get paid for the actual work of recording, editing, mixing, etc.
Thanks so much for sharing this video.
I don't think there is anymore music being made and published then there was before hundreds of thousands of records released before the social media and Spotify was a thing. The costs of CD production and advertising it still costs money to get anywhere. The people dominating streaming are the same people who would in the past and that is how much money they got.
if a record sells 1,000,000 copies at $7-$10, that does not make the artist 7-10 Million. First, you take 7%-14% of that as the artists share. Then you deduct any expenses incurred off the top of that 7%-14% for that huge recording budget, touring costs, promotion, Video production... all comes out of the artists share before any so-called profit is generated. Depending on how creative the label is on calculating expenses (flights, dinners, phone calls, lawyers, you name it) all get paid out of the 7%-14% of the artists share before the artist breaks even" and begins to generate any royalties. The artists made most of their money off of touring and merchandising (selling T shirts). and Mechanical royalties which the label cannot claim against (about 10 cents per song, per album). Since the 2000s the sinking labels initiated the "360" deal in which entitles the label to a substantial portion of ALL those aforementioned revenues.
He did said it was gross income, not what you’d actually get paid
@@diego.lopez_wav Still would be inaccurate since the label sells CDs to the distributor for around $5 each. But, it's not important. I get his point.
cd’s sold for 16-24 dollars in the stores youngster.. lolol
@@austinnichols3557 😂 my bad
Interesting conversation, I don't think I've been engineering long enough to speak on this. All I can say is that client acquisition is really difficult for someone just starting out. Hope everyone who reads this finds something that makes them happy.
Nobody whos not also a artist should be engineering. Its useless. There should be artists/engineers and then basically what im starting to call REPAIRMEN. Repairmen are the ppl who are the autistic ppl who can repair equipment and should never be around people. We all know who these ppl are by the forums and videos. Ppl who run studios need to be good with ppl bc its a service industry. The guys who can repair equipment usually should have been in a different field but got into music bc they thought they liked music and electronics but never thought about dealing with the ppl who make music and frequent studio. Mixing engineers ARE artists and every artist should have a scene theyre going for n thats where ur clients should be.
1 Million Streaming, is not Platinum! Platinum needs to equate to the same income generated to sales sold from a tangle medium. This is crazy, get 1 million streams and you made $3000 on TH-cam.
Platinum sales of an album generated closer to 10-40 Million Dollars for a label but their budget was also in the millions, most artists made 1%-3% of that so unless they went 4x Platinum the artist still didn't make a million dollars unless you're Prince who got more off his music than most artists and learned to make videos and movies to capitalize on the music like Taylor Swift!
I'd only consider royalties if a major label is projecting a large artist, with modern marketing pursuits beyond making 15 TH-cam videos per song, and the probability they're going to use you, good luck with that, do you have a Chris Lord-Alge mix room, with 15 of every best piece of gear? Unless the album will still be sold at Target & Walmart, and whatever other music stores, get your max money upfront. Streaming has dissolved the value of new release music. We need to get back to a tangle medium. In the 90's we bought an entire album for $12-16 for just for 1 or 2 songs we liked. We need better data, on current market income models. Build a brand of what you want to do, which like anything you work a lot for close to no income and when you're so busy there's more work than you can get done, you raise your rates over and over. I wish you all the best! Make 10 videos for anything you're working on or proud of, then make sound packs for random crap you make, try to sell everything you are and make a video on why it's good.
10 points negotiated on an independent artist I'd only do that if there's a history record of what the sales project "should be," all depends on how good their marketing campaigns are etc, nothing is guaranteed, there's no MTV nor radio (radio still plays 90's music, sad), nor stores to see/hear new music releases, nor music magazine (Vibe, Rollingstone etc to see new major label artists). Royalty engineer game is nice, but only works when things are actually done with majors and lawyers, most music mixers aren't getting paid using lawyers. A subscription model for mixing sounds interesting, I'd like to know how to manage that. Sounds like more work for less income like streaming, artists constantly wanting mix updates when adding new tracked vocals 10x a month for the same song.
Studio time will always be a thing. If you are making a beat dont sell the rights to your copyright .I make 45-60 an hour recording. I charge 45 an hour for consulting
Any real artist is gonna require you sell them the exclusive rights to a beat meaning they own it 100% unless theyre just buying a lease. Most producers wont even promote the song after that either so its really not even worth it to buy exclusives from ppl anymore. With how poorly ppl in the “music business” handle actual business, might as well just steal beats from ppl again, distokid wont even take em down lol
For Pop music or Electronic music I think it can work. Maybe Hip Hop as well, but it really depends on the genre IMO. I had this conversation with Adam Nolly Getgood at GuitarSummit and for him it's the opposite for Metal and Rock. He told me he raised his mixing and producing fix fees and doesn't ask for royalties anymore, even as a producer because it's not worth it anymore. Your long term investments doesn't have to be music, you can take that money that you made right now and invest in other industries or real estate or auctions or whatever.
Powerball tickets
Independently, yes.
Corporately, no, for now.
So a select few hourly recording studios will continue to thrive based on expertise and relationship but eventually these large desk format studios will go the way of the dodo as corporations adopt their own recording facilities.
That’s a really fun job waiting to happen for some employee who would be psyched to run a state of the art recording facility for 24 bucks an hour saving the company many thousands of dollars on 3rd party A-room fees over time.
The initial investment may be hefty but over time pays for itself.
Sure, this is not new at all - been done for decades. I used to get work for 'free 'coz I be famuss in da weak' (sic) demands every day. I never touch that. I'm not doing deals with anyone who has no serious label deal. Otherwise, I do huge amounts of work for people who don't have the right raw material, assume I will spend 20+ hours (plus all the shouting - seeing they did not do what I said was needed to get a workable result) when it should have been 8-10 hours. Further, they never do the work to get even a basic audience. Might as well kill monsters.
This is poor advice for the kinds of Level 0 people watching these videos as they have nothing to offer and get the impression that the studio people's time should not be worth the already depressed value so they think they can make these demands or the common $15 for a $150 mix. No one wins from that. Sure it is fine if Green Day comes to me with points but not for MC Jizzy Shizzer who has nothing going on at all.
:-)
Sounds like ur gonna be a repairman in the next couple years.
@@papertiger9845 Well, that's a pretty demeaning thing to say. But true enough as I became a McWorker several years ago and earn more money for less time, and get better respect from crew & customers. Sad that all my skills and experience are lost but that is the choice that the world made.
From My possition as someone who is a good producer composer but a hit and miss kinda when I mix and master. Sometimes My stuff just works great and other times it's so difficult to get a production master to sound good I just end up leaving it. I have music that's bigger then I can finish so to finish these I'm going to have to send them to a mixing engender but they are expensive for Me to send them a full albums worth of music to master for Me will cost at least 4k and then what? I'm not a artist so now I have to lease them and might never get My money back? Post them My self on Spotify despite not being a artist? It's all a headache for Me make Me want to quit music.
Haha Im just getting my home studio almost done Ive been slowly working on here and there for 2 years now I can do everything I can do at a studio but on my own time, and in my own crib without the hasstle of smalltalk with lames who tryna make a living aha lowkey home studios is worth it if you serious about it... and u dont need a damn studio u can legit record in a corner of the room with a towel or in a car.. the real spill is learning how to do everything on the computer.... most hits u know now a days are recorded in hotel rooms.... ask me any questions
Nobody has any questions to ask u dog u sound like a dumbass who should stop spending money on gear if ur not trying to make money.
I get paid by the hour.