Price Estimate Request

[quinnsea]

Hello! I'm working on making a dating sim intended to take place in the future about superheroes.

Since I am going to charge people for this game, I've quickly decided that it's important the assets are mostly original. I was going to initially use stock music, and if I can't get enough money through an Indiegogo campaign or something to hire anyone to make music for me I still might just use stock music.

I wanna get an idea of what I should shoot for, how much money this is gonna cost me.

I don't know anything about music or sound design, so I'm sorry to say my instructions/requests are gonna be pretty vague.

In terms of genre, I'd like the majority of the soundtrack to be electronic. Since the story will be fast-paced and short (about 4-6 hours total playtime to go through one route?) the music should match with a middle to fast tempo. The only exceptions being one or two sad and romantic instrumentals.

The first few songs played in the prologue should be acoustic or just generally laid-back? One of the characters also has a band that plays more around indie pop (in the same vein as Foster the People and Two Door Cinema Club?). So only about 6-8 songs should break that cohesion to the same genre.

I wanna guess that the complete soundtrack will have at most 30 songs, each song being 1-3 minutes depending on what the composer finds appropriate.

Since my game is still pretty early in development, I felt like I didn't have enough information to put on the official forum for hiring people. I hope this is enough information just to get an idea of how much money it would most likely cost me to hire someone to make a soundtrack like this.

Again, I don't really know anything about music so if this isn't enough information to get a fair estimate feel free to let me know what else I should include.

Thanks a bunch for the help! I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum to post this to!

[D.ray]

Since no one has responded, what you're looking for can range anything from the spectrum of free to $1000 per minute of music. It's common for most composers to charge per minute of music so it'll be likely that this is the standard by what you'll be charged. Of course you can also be charged by project rather than per minute of music. It really depends on the composer and the deal you end up working out with them.

Since we're talking about an indie game here, start off with the lowest price range. Say $10 per minute of music. Now you've estimated you'll need about 30 songs. Now assume each track is 3 minutes and do the math

30 songs x 3 minutes = 90 minutes
90 minutes x $10 per minute of music = $900 or less.

Simply substitute the numbers to give you a better idea for different rates. Say you find another composer that charges $50 per minute and everything else stays the same. It'll come out to $4,500. Or one that charges $100 per minute will come out to $9000.

Another way to do this is to estimate how much music you'l need in terms of minutes. so instead of saying you need x amount of songs at x of minutes, just assume you'll need about an hours worth of music. At $10 per minute that comes out to $600.

I don't know how familiar you are with price ranges, but the numbers I gave above are pretty conservative for what an indie composer will charge. Here's a rough guideline on how much composers will charge depending on what tier and what type of games they work on. Also please keep in mind there is some cross over and this just my personal classification.

Free - Novice who will work for experience and exposure rather than cash (results may vary)
Anything under $100 - small budget tier
$100 to $300 per minute - indie project tier
$300 to $600 per minute - mid tier
$700 to $1000 per minute - high tier
$1000+ per minute- triple A game/Hollywood movie composer tier.

You can find quality material on any level, so don't think you need someone who charges a lot of dough to get a good product. Picking a composer that is right for your budget and project is more important. For most VN's, composers who work with small budget or indie budget projects are usually what's right.

If you're lucky you may be able to fiance the music out of pocket, or at the very least a few tracks that can be featured in a demo. Once that's done, you can raise the rest of the funds. You can also offer a percentage of your sales as compensation.

In general, composers are good with a variety of genres, but say you find one that's really good with electronic music but isn't comfortable with indie rock. You can simply hire another composer to do the indie rock tracks. There are lots of games who use more than 1 composer. You just have to make sure the quality is uniform among all of them, and that they are aware there are other composers. Some might not like it (a minority), others probably won't mind at all (the majority).

My last piece of advice is to keep in mind that you might not need as much music as you think you do. I've played VN's with 30 minute soundtracks or less. As well as ones that simply consisted of 6 track totals.