Typical advance fee for production of a track

[MathieuF]

Hi !

Been a while since I worked on anything Taxi related but I just got a cool offer today that might bring me back to producing for this kind of business !

So one of the libraries that got a lot of my tracks are offering me an advance fee to produce new tracks. In the past it was just a "we pay you if we sync the track" kind of deal but now they offer to pay an advance fee then exclusive rights on it.

What would be the ball park price for one track ? Or like a bundle of 20+ tracks ? Considering, from my understanding, that it would be the only time I would get paid, the tracks would then be theirs 100%.

Please let me know, maybe in private if you don't want your prices to be public Thanks !

Mathieu

[andygabrys]

First off congrats on getting into an inner circle with this publisher.

I don't think anybody would fault you for taking up front money to produce tracks. I have done it and so has just about anybody else. We all have to eat and pay expenses.

The problem at this point is that it's contributing to the "race to the bottom". I would not consider it (A complete buyout) unless the payout was insane - like >$1,000 per track.

If like EO says you get a split of royalties or retain all writers in return for a "sync buy out" then thats more equitable.

[eeoo]

I've done work for hire deals where i got paid upfront in exchange for giving up splitting any sync fees that the tracks might generate in the future. At least in that scenario you keep your writer's share. Maybe you could negotiate something like that?

[SubRivers]

First off I will state I have never been offered an advance and still a relative novice at this - but my 2 cents.

In a negotiation there are two data points

1. The average revenue on your tracks with this publisher over a year
2. average revenue of your star tracks with this publisher over a year.

If the publisher only accepts and pays if they think the track is a killer one then you should be charging on the basis of some mulitple of #2

Certainly the fee is somewhere in the range of some multiple of the revenue between #1 to #2.

All depends on how much choice the publisher has in the acceptance process as to how close it #1 or #2