Guest Blog: Calculating the Value of A Promotional Music Portrait

Guitarist Al Street by Jacob Blickenstaff

The promotional portrait is a key tool for bands and solo artists who want to reach an audience across a wide range of media.

It’s worthwhile for an artist or band to commission and license great photography. By collaborating with a photographer, the artist has control of their visual identity and creates more opportunities for media coverage. Being seen more frequently in a positive way is a valuable thing for a musician who is trying to attract an audience and sell albums.   Music publicists charge a small fortune for this very thing by means of writing and distributing press releases and engaging press contacts to write about their artists.  Photographs enhance these efforts, and in my experience, can create their own opportunities in and of themselves.

A great promotional portrait can be used in many ways by the artist:

Press and media requests – This is probably the most important. Most music magazines and blogs rely heavily on free images supplied by the artist or their label, especially now that none of them seem to have money to create their own images. A good, creative image can really help with more visually prominent coverage and more coverage overall.

Band / Label Websites – Promo portraits are commonly used for a band profile on label websites or for main images on a band website – it’s also good practice to have  high resolution images for download available directly on the artist website.

Venue and Festival Websites – The venues and festivals that book artists almost always want images of the band for their own online calendars, websites and sometimes printed promotional materials.  Again, a band with a great picture is more likely to be featured in the graphics of a calendar or group poster.

Show Posters -  A good portrait can be adapted to a promotional flyer. A lot of bands and labels will design a generic poster for a tour that local venues and street teams can have printed and fill in their local information.

Social Media – Bands need good images for profile images, background images and galleries.

Being able to kill so many birds with one stone is clearly worth ‘something’; it’s more than fair to be paid for these uses.  Its not just about creating cool pictures of rock ‘n roll musicians, you are supporting the essential business side of what they do.  You have to support the business side of what you do by charging for it.

Other important factors:

Production Costs: If you are creating original imagery, be careful to factor in any out of pocket expenses such as equipment rentals, props, hair, make-up, clothing stylists, location fees, assistants and transportation. I generally leave this to the preference of the client depending on their needs, tastes and budget.

Level of the Artist: The uses described above will change in scale depending on whether the band is an unsigned independent, signed to a small indie label, signed to a notable indie label or signed with a major label.  The types of uses are generally the same, but the frequency and scale that they are used can vary widely.

Duration of License: It’s usually a good idea to limit the license of use to a specific time period, usually 1-2 years.  Early images of a band that becomes successful can become valuable to the photographer, if you don’t retain control over your work after a given time period, then you could lose potential income.

To sum it up in a basic formula:  Rate for Promotional Music Portraits = (V x L ) + P

V = Basic value of the promotional license
L= professional level of the artist
P= production costs

Example:

Say you’ve valued a basic promo package at $450 for a year, the artist is on a indie label and expects some moderate press exposure, the artist wants to shoot on film, which will cost $150 in materials and processing.

The estimated rate would be ( $450 x 1.5 ) + $150 =  $825

Any questions?

This is Part 2 of a 5 Part series, you can read Part 1 of this series here

Tagged as: Freelance, Music, music photography, promotion, studio