Regarding "work for exposure"

[Ryuno074]

I'm seeing more and more people come here (and not to the collaboration forum, as they should) to recruit musicians and sound designers to their projects. We're in a site chock-full of music licensed in a way that it can be used in non-commercial games, so if they were wanting to do one of those, they could easily grab a track and give the artist credit. As expected, many of them believe they cannot afford music and sound design rates, and want custom service pro bono, gratis, absolutely free. Which would be understandable if it wasn't obvious they're going to profit from these games, and their defense when asked why they can't pay a musician for custom work is that the exposure would be good enough.

Talking from experience, and audio work is how I make a living, it isn't.

Let's be realistic: the people asking you to do free work aren't Carmack or Gaben. They wouldn't need free work if they were. There's not going to be a lot of people looking forward to the game, there's not going to be bloggers revealing details over the course of months to eager soon-to-be fans. These are developers who will not, by default, get tremendous amount of media exposure themselves, and in the off-chance their game would be the next big thing, the composer's name would be far down in the journalist's priority list to mention in an article or even a YouTube video.

I understand many developers don't have money right now, and can't pay upfront, but that's no excuse for why they should profit out of what you make and never compensate you for being a part of it. Anyone who says the music isn't important to the game experience could very well release the game without it, but everyone knows that's absolutely untrue.

Now, we know there's some money to be made of ads, even in a post-AdBlock world. This seems to be the plan most developers that come here asking for free work for their projects have; a thread I saw earlier this week mentioned the developer's games get over a million plays, which should make some ad revenue... but not enough to give a small percentage to people using their time, energy and years of studying music off whatever money comes from that. Funny, isn't it? A percentage can be taken from any sum, but they reject that notion and decide money goes to them, "exposure" goes to you.

Let me tell you why: they don't want to deal with you. It was never a partnership. You could do better than this.

This is free market and I know some of us are eager to just make music to be featured on projects, but you're shooting yourself in the foot every time you accept to work for exposure in a project you know will make others money. Next time they need a track and come to ask you, they're not going to want to pay you for a service they got for free the other day; I've seen people say that as well, and it's a lie. If someone wants your work in their game that will make money, it has some sort of value and it's only fair you're remunerated as such, be it upfront or with a percentage on future gains. If they don't think so, I'm sure there are a lot of people developing completely free games for fun that would appreciate your participation in their projects.

I hope this rant helps musicians who are just starting and not sure of how to act at the beginning of their careers.