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[Trev]

Hey guys n gals!

Just saw the "DONT POST PORTFOLIOS" rule and thought I would change this post.
Where do you fellow composers go to find projects?
Alternately, developers- where do you seek out sound departments?

[YogX]

As for me - I'm browsing the TIGSource forums and the IndieDB website.
I'm sending personal messages to developers of games who are interesting to me.

Since I don't really have a portfolio yet it's been kind of hard the find work like this.
I hope this will change as my portfolio will grow.

[Voltz.Supreme]

Yeah, There's an actual portfolio Page but it's flooded with composer portfolios... Like godmoney said, seek em out yourself.
All the best!

[Trev]

Thanks! I'll check out indie db.
I'm getting close to just taking up learning code and make the game I want to score myself!

[moi]

advice from a developer who has spent some time browsing composers portofolios and ended up buying royalty free music:

-state your rates upfront
-make your music samples easy to listen to
-make your website as easy to navigate as possible
-if you have a preferred style, put it to the front. If you have several styles group them by style.
-if you offer royalty-free music, make the buying process as easy as possible (there are website plugins for that)
-maybe indie composers could unite to create a big website instead of several personal sites.

ATM, IME, royalty-free music seems to be a good deal for both low-fund devs and starting composers without connexions (royalty free doesn't have to be dirt cheap either).

This comes from a dev with a very small budget, to find bigger budgeted projects you'd probably have to make friends, or bring a new style.

[ANtY]

Thanks! I'll check out indie db.
I'm getting close to just taking up learning code and make the game I want to score myself!

well, that's the best way I'd say

[YogX]

advice from a developer who has spent some time browsing composers portofolios and ended up buying royalty free music:

-state your rates upfront
-make your music samples easy to listen to
-make your website as easy to navigate as possible
-if you have a preferred style, put it to the front. If you have several styles group them by style.
-if you offer royalty-free music, make the buying process as easy as possible (there are website plugins for that)
-maybe indie composers could unite to create a big website instead of several personal sites.

ATM, IME, royalty-free music seems to be a good deal for both low-fund devs and starting composers without connexions (royalty free doesn't have to be dirt cheap either).

This comes from a dev with a very small budget, to find bigger budgeted projects you'd probably have to make friends, or bring a new style.

It's always depressing to me - as a composer who is trying to get into the business - to hear about another developer going the royalty free route...

[moi]

I also had ethical reservations about it at the beginning, but the more I think about it, the more I think it's okay. Not every game can have handmade music, and some composers seem to make good money from selling RF tracks.

[Meatsack]

As a broke-ass indie hobbyist, I can't afford much more than "free" for costs.  I don't kid myself by even hinting at a "rev-share" deal, either.  Maybe if one of my projects goes viral like Flappy Bird, I'd then be in a position to pay for a professional composer.  Until then, let me answer your last question.

I go to find composers in the Indie Dev forums like this site.  I am also active in the www.gamedev.net forums.  They have an actual Classifieds section where Indies of assorted talents can go to find work or advertise themselves.  That's where I pulled together a small team for Super Gunball. (Shameless plug.)  Likewise, I hit up some sub-Reddits like r/gamemaker, r/gamedevclassifieds, and r/IndieGaming/ (and others) to find like minded people with which I could work.  In the end, I got lucky and wound up with a composer/artist about to start college looking to get his name in the credits for anything.  If nothing else, he does have a freely accessible "demo" of the game with his name in the credits now as the music/soundFX guy he can show as an example of his work.

My advice is to cast a wide net and get involved in as many communities as you have time to cultivate.  You can't rely on people coming to you even after you get noticed and have some experience.  I mean really... off the top of your head, who knows the name of the guy that wrote the Mario theme? (OK. You composers might have already known, but I had to look it up!)  If the name came up in casual conversation, I'd bet 90% of the Indie Devs out there wouldn't recognize it right away.  That's not to say that game composers can't get famous, they just aren't usually the face person of the development group.

tl;dr: Look for work where devs hang out.  You have to go to them.  Those places (AFAIK) are this site, Reddit, Gamedev.net, GameMaker forums, RPG Maker forums, Unity forums, TWINE forums, any other game engine forums...

[mscottweber]

advice from a developer who has spent some time browsing composers portofolios and ended up buying royalty free music:

-state your rates upfront
-make your music samples easy to listen to
-make your website as easy to navigate as possible
-if you have a preferred style, put it to the front. If you have several styles group them by style.
-if you offer royalty-free music, make the buying process as easy as possible (there are website plugins for that)
-maybe indie composers could unite to create a big website instead of several personal sites.

ATM, IME, royalty-free music seems to be a good deal for both low-fund devs and starting composers without connexions (royalty free doesn't have to be dirt cheap either).

This comes from a dev with a very small budget, to find bigger budgeted projects you'd probably have to make friends, or bring a new style.

Thanks for this honest and upfront answer! It's one thing to get advice from other successful composers, but I really value thoughts and feedback from developers on this stuff.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i think most games do well with custom-made soundtracks, but i think royalty free has its place. sometimes a game can have 95% custom made music by a single composer, but then it needs a song in a particular style that the normal composer can't handle, in that case filling out the rest of the 5% with royalty free tracks makes sense

buying royalty free music is probably also a good idea for throw-away games that you are making for contests rather than to sell too. i mean, let's say you are making a game that needs only 3 tracks of music, and you're making it in a week, and it's for a contest where you might, if you win, win $500. can a developer really justify paying a composer the standard rate of $100 a minute for music for a game that *might* make $500 if it wins a contest but probably won't make anything? the dev would have to be crazy to do that. but the game still needs music, so paying $20 per song for 2 or 3 songs can work

[bonixmusic]

I also had ethical reservations about it at the beginning, but the more I think about it, the more I think it's okay. Not every game can have handmade music, and some composers seem to make good money from selling RF tracks.

I'd agree. Not all game devs have a very large budget for game music which is unfortunate, but that's the reality of it. Most cannot afford $100-$300+ per minute of music unless you're a more established game dev/company. RF is a good option, but custom music is most composers preferred method.

[GarrettB]

As a composer with some experience with professional devs, there are a lot of reasons why custom music is the far superior option. Most notably, stylistic coherence. If you're grabbing random tracks from different royalty free sources and pasting them into your game, you wind up with a heap of different styles and a lack of creative identity. Even if they're trying to sound the same, music composers all have different styles that come through in so many ways - instrumentation, mixing, phrasing, etc.

When you have one guy who's dedicated to writing for your game, you get to establish an aural "vibe" that is consistent throughout the whole experience. Yeah, it can come at a price, but you really do get what you pay for.

Also, as a composer, seeing devs turn away hopeful applicants due to sheer volume and cost really is a sad thing. Our market is over-saturated to hell and back again.

[ashtonmorris]

advice from a developer who has spent some time browsing composers portofolios and ended up buying royalty free music:

-state your rates upfront
-make your music samples easy to listen to
-make your website as easy to navigate as possible
-if you have a preferred style, put it to the front. If you have several styles group them by style.
-if you offer royalty-free music, make the buying process as easy as possible (there are website plugins for that)
-maybe indie composers could unite to create a big website instead of several personal sites.

ATM, IME, royalty-free music seems to be a good deal for both low-fund devs and starting composers without connexions (royalty free doesn't have to be dirt cheap either).

This comes from a dev with a very small budget, to find bigger budgeted projects you'd probably have to make friends, or bring a new style.

I think this is good advice. I have an issue posting my rates though for various reasons. Mainly I have a bit of flexibility when it comes to my rates, and I wouldn't want someone to be scared away off the bat and leave me without the option to work with them or negotiate. 
Also (and I dont mean to sound like an art snobb or anything) but sometimes I perceive other artists or musicians who openly post that they have low rates or will work for barely anything, I feel like it can tarnish the perception of their art, or it seems to have less mystique or something.

Anyone who has read up on marketing or advertisement knows that for cheaper goods advertisers post many many of the items benefits (ex. a boom box with a thousand knobs to adjust everything, the warranty, the price etc.) but for luxury goods they rarely advertise more than a few specifics (like an ipod commercial or a Jaguar). And although my services certainly are cheaper than luxury goods I wouldn't want to make my art seem like a cheap commodity even though it technically is cheap.

But perhaps I will try that to post my rates, if that is what dev's prefer. I'll definitely think about it. I imagine it feels like showing all my cards to early though.

As for Royalty Free music, perhaps I have missed out on that. I certainly have plenty of music that was never used but is very good. But I have never done that or don't know how to sell it that way. Do any of you composers have advice on that?

For indie games I imagine receiving royalties is few and far between. From interviews I have read from various well known indie composers, they end up getting the bulk of their income from album sales for successful indie games. Rather than royalties or flat rates.

As for copyrights, most of the clients I have had have been international. And even if they did something I didn't want with my music, I don't think I would have the income to handle an international lawyer or if the laws would even apply there the same as here. So I don't understand the royalty free thing.

Finding work is definitely hard sometimes for any freelancer. We happen to be at a point in history where there is an abundance of talent and technology/music creation tools and ways to communicate. And it certainly can be difficult to stand out.


Here are some things that have helped me

∙Be friendly and communicate often, respond to inquiries as fast as you can.
∙Try to maintain an up-to-date website and portfolio (which is real hard because you may have done some awesome work last year, but you can't display it until the game is out.)
∙I check various forums every Monday, and I try post my portfolio in relevant forums monthly, and I try not to over do it or post in the wrong thread .
∙Follow every composer I appreciate and developer whose games I have enjoyed on Twitter as well as audio companies that make plugins and DAW's and check it daily for community news and info- I think this one is really useful -
∙Check Devlogs often and participate in the conversation and really try to be involved in the community.
∙Constantly read articles and interviews with great composers, developers or anyone successful.
∙Talk to people I know or at work if they know anyone who needs any help.
∙I occasionally look for lists of up and coming indie dev studios and contact all of them.
∙Check elance occasionally (I've only successfully landed one gig on there so far).
∙I've tried websites like AudioDraft, but their contests are few and far between.
∙I occasionally post my music in various Soundcloud game related groups for exposure.
∙Hope that my past clients recommend me to another developer in the future.


Currently I'd say I spend 15% of my time actually creating engaging audio and 85% of my time trying to find people who would want to use it or pay for it! But maybe that's how it always is. I recently read an interview with a sound designer for cinema and he said that almost all of his time he is just editing audio clips in protools, and occasionally he gets to create cool sound designs.

I hope this wasn't too long.

[F4LL0UT]

Aside from presenting your stuff wherever you can:

Pro bono work for academic projects or freeware games. Now, these offers don't always reach you by themselves but when they do, just accept them unless you really have no time for them. Sometimes it feels like (and even is) an utter waste of time, often it's as exhausting and unnerving as working professionally for a paying client with no apparent reward but generally it's a good idea. I owe multiple freelance jobs for decent pay to that kind of stuff, particularly to voluntary work done for students. Academic projects are sometimes presented at conventions (with potential clients being among the visitors), the students may remember and hire or recommend you months or even years after graduating and some academic projects are kept in a hall of fame or something of the corresponding academy/university (or at least brought up from time to time by the teachers) so even future students at the same facility may come up with the idea of contacting you. All these scenarios have come true for me at one point or another.

[Trev]

This is all very helpful, though I wouldn't discount a certain degree of "right place/right time" being involved. Thanks so much, and best of luck to all of you!

[Level-Up-Audio]

Hey, I'd like to throw in my 2 cents into this conversation. I do freelance music and sound for games. I don't make a ton of money from this, but I am grateful for the money that I do make from it, as it pays some bills, and the work is satisfying (all profit, no overhead, make my own hours, set my own rates, getting repeat clients, can work in my underwear).

Anyways, here's what I think. I think that, like in any profession, it's up to the contractor (composer) to prove to his/her potential clients that their product (custom audio) is worth buying. To most developers (who are usually uneducated about the audio process), trying to sell music for $X hundreds of dollars per music MINUTE, when they can just buy a canned track from audiojungle for $20, well.... that's enough to scare most developers away from custom music composers. And as for sound design, I mean, how much time could it possibly take to create just 1 stinking measly sound effect asset that lasts 0.5 seconds? Why not just buy a canned sound effect asset from website X for $2, rather than pay a sound designer more money to create a custom effect?

Again, it's up to the composer to prove to the developer WHY going the "canned audio" route is the wrong way, and why it's worth it to pay a professional for custom music and sound. Composers need to get developers to understand that crafting high quality custom music and sound for an interactive medium like games takes care and time. It's up to the developer then to figure out: Is it worth my time to spend hours and hours looking for cheap canned music that may or may not end up being satisfactory or representative of the high quality of work that I put into developing this game already? OR, is it worth my MONEY to pay a real professional to do this for me, and be more or less guaranteed high quality results?

Another example of a communication gap between an audio guy and developers is sound design, Testing and re-iteration are a luxury that most developers don't have, and they simply don't understand that getting a sound effect to work inside a game is a lot more complicated than what may appear on the surface of a 0.5 second sound effect asset. "Oh it's a 0.5 second sound effect, that must have taken you like, 5 minutes to make right?"...when in reality some troublesome effects may end up taking 45 minutes just finding the right raw layers for the sound, 15 minutes to edit, render, mix/master, and file. And in the end, when the sound designer has completed his shiny new 0.5 second sound effect asset, and delivers it to the developer...the developer says he doesn't quite like it, and he expects you to do another re-iteration for free, still not understanding that it took far longer than just 5 minutes to create this effect. This happens...all...the...time. Suddenly a 0.5 second sound asset isn't as simple as it seems. Finding the right bleeps and bloops to create good sound design is an art in itself, and not as simple as typing "Bleeps and bloops" into the search bar, clicking the first thing you see, and saying, "Job done!"

Sorry, this sort of boiled over into sound design a bit, but the general points apply to music composing too. I agree with most posters' sentiments that there is a disconnect between what a developer wants (good audio for cheap), and what a composer wishes the developer could understand (good audio don't come cheap!)

Hope this helps!

[Calum Bowen]

For indie games I imagine receiving royalties is few and far between. From interviews I have read from various well known indie composers, they end up getting the bulk of their income from album sales for successful indie games. Rather than royalties or flat rates.

just my 2 cents on this. in my experience, soundtrack sales never amount to anywhere near what you're paid for to make the music (I know you said well known indie composers in the post but it implies that that's what people should try & rely on). You only really have a chance of making reliable money if the game is wildly popular. Outside of minecraft/fez/super meat boy, i wouldn't be confident saying that even well known indie composers make most of their money through OST sales.

In my experience, the thing that helps massively is being including in some kind of bundle (specifically, Game Music Bundle)!

I don't have much experience of royalties at all so I can't really say how much that'll help. It seems that most of the ways that inexperienced game devs can afford to pay you a reasonable amount is through sponsorship or perhaps a successful kickstarter - at least that's what i notice as trends for games I see more successful composers work on. And then beyond those are established devs who can rely on the sales of previous games to pay you.

[moi]

bad quote

[ashtonmorris]

just my 2 cents on this. in my experience, soundtrack sales never amount to anywhere near what you're paid for to make the music (I know you said well known indie composers in the post but it implies that that's what people should try & rely on). You only really have a chance of making reliable money if the game is wildly popular. Outside of minecraft/fez/super meat boy, i wouldn't be confident saying that even well known indie composers make most of their money through OST sales.

Yeah actually I read that from an interview from Super Meat Boy composer Danny Baranowsky. But I guess I was meaning that that is a attainable goal, not common but not impossible. Interestingly while looking for his exact quote (which I couldn't find) I found two other answers in an interview that I think are relevant to our topic.

"OSV: I wanted to talk a bit about what you’re up to right now. I know the Drifter Kickstarter got funded, it looks very cool. Had you started writing material for it before it was fully started or do you wait until afterwards?

Danny B: I did the track for the Kickstarter trailer before I knew. I try not to do work for hire so much anymore, I try to get percentages on the backend and keep rights to the music. So for most of the stuff I do these days I don’t get any money up front, I just try to pick projects that are going to do good. I had faith that the project was going to do good and the Kickstarter was going to be okay so I just did a couple things for him beforehand. Sometimes it backfires but I think the risk is worth it so in this case it worked out and I think it’s going to do really well."

and

"OSV: I think people would be surprised to hear that you could get more money doing a score for an indie game over a triple-A.

Danny B: Well, especially the ones where I get percentages that do really well. I got a percentage on Isaac and Isaac sold a million copies, so, you know. I don’t know, again, I could be totally wrong. I’ve just talked to a fair number of people who have done triple-A stuff and it just seems like they should get more. Maybe I’m biased because I’m a composer. I’m sure that Hans Zimmer got plenty for Modern Warfare 2 and I’m sure Jesper Kyd does great and all that still. It’s more people in my situation.

I know some of the people who worked on Mass Effect…I don’t mean to say that they’re being stingy, it’s more about that when this is a game that took over 500 people to make, you’re not going to get as much of a chunk but when it’s 3 guys and you’re splitting sales from even less money, you’re going to get more. A lot of indie games don’t, I’ve done tons of games that made barely anything but it was more because you take a risk and sometimes it’s Binding of Isaac and sometimes it’s Zits and Giggles."