Hey GD-composers, I am collecting data for a study on the ethics of pricing freelance compositional (creative) services in the game industry. If you are a freelance composer (sorry sound designers) or have been a freelance composer (that is to say, if you have charged for freelance compositional services) for games, I would really appreciate you filling out my VERY quick survey. There are 7 questions concerning your pricing practices and one question where you can voice an opinion about the ethics of freelancing creative services. The data collected is anonymous so PLEASE only click the Submit button ONCE! There is no way for me to contact you to clarify any data and the data collected, in my opinion, falls in the realm of private business. Please be honest, this is for research. In the open field, I would like you to express your thoughts on how freelancing services fit in the game industry, or if you feel that you're under-valued, or what factors play into how you bid for a project. I know how I work, what my methods are, and I have thoughts on where I'm going wrong, and I have spoken to friends about their pricing, but I'm really interested in massing a larger data set to inform my research into this ethical question. Here is the survey: Compositional Survey Feel free to assert public opinions here and if there's something serious bugging you that you don't want to post publicly, please take advantage of the anonymity of the survey, but please only use the survey once or it'll screw up the data set. Feel free to forward this survey to friends who also freelance, if you're interested in forwarding my research on the subject. Ideally, this could/would turn into an interesting white paper of some sort. Cheers,

Be sure to also take a look at the discussion on per-minute rates from about a year ago.

Here's a link:
Forums>Music and Sound>How much $ would you charge?

I most certainly will, thanks for the link.

So far the response has been pretty good--most of the respondants have had 3 to 6 years of experience and I'm hoping to get a much larger, broader data set.

EDIT:

I've had some questions come up through the survey and on some other forums and I thought I'd address my goals for this research more clearly. Muzo72, I really appreciate your perspective and your battle to encourage a more sophisticated pricing scheme, and I hope to explore those ideas, but for the moment, per/minute is common-place, and in order to understand the marketplace more clearly, my research is focusing on that.

In a way, it doesn't matter how much per minute you actually charge because there's some total amount of music that needs to be made and some total bulk cost needed to be paid and how the cost of x soundtrack ends up being rationalized can still be distilled to a per/minute fee and I'm sure some studios boil it down in their collective heads that way despite how the costs are divied.

Nonetheless, I agree with your argument.

For the people who brought up questions in the survey itself, this is my reply:

I've had some questions come up through the survey and through some other forums and I thought I'd address my goals for this research (since I don't know from where the survey posters linked):

we live in a free-market global society. Our regional living wage can determine how we bid for projects, but that is not the same everywhere we go.

We are driven by a competitive market-place to lower our prices as much as we can bare, but at the same time, when we lower our own prices, we lower the market's prices. This ripples out into every corner of our marketplace.

Sometimes we try to distinguish the disparities between our pricings through our respective profiles in the industry. We say things like, oh yeah, he's cheap, but he's also just a student trying to figure stuff out and if you want a real pro go with me for x, etc.

What happens, however, is that the market place is flooded with low paying jobs and those kids who were making it at so little before can't get a living-wage job anymore because the development studios are so used to getting it cheap that they transform how they conduct business at every level of the development

Their budgets for audio shrink, their expectations for audio shrink, and what does that lead to?

Devalued audio services for everyone.

Part of my survey is designed to watermark the market with a consensus. The survey will be publicized and people just starting out can indicate or defer to the survey as an index or guidance for how they should go about pricing their services.

At the same time, the essay, which will come some time afterward, will discuss our responsibility to the market-place, to ourselves, and to eachother.

I hope that explains my intentions more clearly.

[Edited by - Dannthr on September 22, 2008 11:38:00 AM]