Negotiating my first sound/music contract. Advice?

[Idiomatic]

Hello there, I'm trying to land an on-going music/sound-design contract with a potential client (a game development company). I'm fairly new to this niche of audio, having done most of my work with bands and artists. So I'm just wondering what I should base my rates on for sound design and composing for on-going indie game projects, given my relative new-ness to this side of the business (gaming)?

I have faith in my skills and my ability to produce to a high level with the equipment available to me. I'm not willing to under-sell myself, but I don't want to lose this gig, because it's precisely the kind of client I have been trying to find.

Any advice on where to ballpark my rates for sound design/music for an indie-level game given my experience? I have 2 years audio education, and 5 years "in the industry". (whatever that means, sigh...)

This is the model that I am basing my rates on. Please let me know if it makes sense, or is completely off-base.

a) 30 seconds of music = 4 to 5 hrs of work on average. This depends on many obvious factors that I won't go into here because this post is already getting too long. The client wants full orchestral music in 1 minute clips.

b) 1 sound effect = maybe 30 minutes to 1 hour on average, again, depending on numerous obvious factors.

c) My time as an audio engineer, music composer, performer/sequencer, and sound designer is worth around $350 per music minute. From what I've heard $300-$1000 per music minute is the normal industry range? So if one minute of music takes me 10 hours to complete, my time is worth $35/hour, I guess, even though, from my point of view, I'm performing 4 billable skills. Hell, at the studio I used to work at, we charged $65/hr just to set up some mics and hit the record button (you know what I mean). Composing and performing? Depends on the project, but we would certainly bill for those as well, on top of the $65/hr engineering fee. I feel that $35/hr is a real bargain, and yet, at the same time I feel that it could scare this client away. I have no idea how much money they have, or what their budget is. Is it even appropriate to ask what their budget is before negotiations begin?

I've heard that $25-$50 per sound effect is also normal for the industry? I won't be doing any implementation at all, they have a team that does that already. I was thinking $15-$20 would be pretty reasonable to charge?

Again, I do not want to under-sell myself, but I don't want to scare this client away!

Thanks for any constructive help on this.

 

[Chili]

An old neighbor of mine did something very similar to this for a living. He would provide sound fonts to apps developers, game designers, music for jingles, etc. He told me once that he was doing sound fonts for an email client developer and was going to get about $4000- $5000 for the project. It was all upfront money because he was a "work for hire" contractor.

What he was doing was maybe a little different than normal studios as he was providing the complete sound font package and not charging per minute or second of audio. So, he had to design little sound clips for each action in the email client; like when a message was sent or received a certain tone would ring. And the developers had a particular theme they wanted the sound fonts to be based on so he had to work within those constraints.

He would come up with something, present it to them, let them make comments/critiques/etc, go back and make changes and present again until they liked what he had.

I would think the first step is to find out what their budget is. Base your estimate and subsequent work on that, then go from there. If they've been in business for a while, they aren't afraid to negotiate or haggle a little on price, but you've got to have stuff to upsale.

Hope this helps.

 

[Idiomatic]

Yea, I definitely want to find out their budget. They've been around for several years, and it seems like 2012 was a good year for them. They want to upgrade their music and audio from simple MIDI stuff to full orchestral kind of stuff. From what I understand, each game project requires about 1 minute of music, and maybe 25 sound effects. Ideally, I would love to bill them in the range of $600-$900 per project, but again, I have no idea if this is way too low, or way too high.