Intellectual Property for commercial music (1 Viewer)

[Beanstalk]

I prepared a 3 minute piece of instrumental music for a webcasting company. They are happy with it and would like to use it. They have asked for Intellectual property of the piece. Is IP something I should give up? Maybe is it standard to give IP to the customer, when selling music?

Its not a piece of music that they could sell on to anyone else to make millions off of, and I wouldn't have any need for it myself, so the risks of handing over IP seem small to me.

Any idea how much I should charge for a 3 minute piece of music?

 

[bedbugs]

I prepared a 3 minute piece of instrumental music for a webcasting company. They are happy with it and would like to use it. They have asked for Intellectual property of the piece. Is IP something I should give up? Maybe is it standard to give IP to the customer, when selling music?

Its not a piece of music that they could sell on to anyone else to make millions off of, and I wouldn't have any need for it myself, so the risks of handing over IP seem small to me.

Any idea how much I should charge for a 3 minute piece of music?

As a (general) rule, you should never give up your ip, BUT if they're really insistent then the fee should go up significantly. What that fee is, depends on how big this company is, what their client base is and how long they're gonna be using for it. usually buy outs of ip are done by the year, so if they use it past the 12 month period, they owe you the same again.

But coming to an agreed amount can be difficult. I've seen jobs where 30 secs of music for a tv commercial pays between €1k and €20k. Likewise with documentaries -anywhere from 2k to sky's the limit. I've never done any work for websites as such so I'm not sure what the standard is.

Hope that helps.

c

 

[Beanstalk]

Thanks bedbugs. I forgot to ask...if I don't give away the IP then what is the alternative... a gentleman's agreement whereby they can use the piece of music as much as they want without paying me royalties? I wouldn't expect to be getting royalties from a web-seminars anyway.

I think the only reason they are looking for IP is they just want to pay one lump sum up front, use the music as much as they want, and not have to worry about future costs...which is fair enough from their point of view.

€2000...wow! Even if its only for webcasting, I must be seriously undervaluing my work, cos I was thinking of charging much much less!

 

[bedbugs]

Thanks bedbugs. I forgot to ask...if I don't give away the IP then what is the alternative... a gentleman's agreement whereby they can use the piece of music as much as they want without paying me royalties? I wouldn't expect to be getting royalties from a web-seminars anyway.

I think the only reason they are looking for IP is they just want to pay one lump sum up front, use the music as much as they want, and not have to worry about future costs...which is fair enough from their point of view.

€2000...wow! Even if its only for webcasting, I must be seriously undervaluing my work, cos I was thinking of charging much much less!

Good point, that it'd be hard to track royalty wise.

Regarding the fee, €2k wouldn't be unreasonable for a job like this; 3 mins of music, total buy out. I'd say they'd be getting a bargain.

 

[Goodbye]

Not uncommon. In a semi-related note. When a producer buys a script off a writer in order to make a film the writer has no alternative in order to get paid to sign a contract giving up HIS RIGHTS to his script.
Intellectual property law is a BEAST!

 

[nooleen]

i'm involved in a project right now which is funded by a government agency; everything we do is their property. there are field and microscrope photographs i've taken that were really for myself (aesthetic poncing) but officially they don't belong to me because i took them on government time. then again, no-one's really keeping track of me.