I had a recent exchange with some fellow music photographers. A photographer asked whether they should charge a well known music artist to use their photographs on the artist’s MySpace page. One photographer replied with the idea of charging per image what the band charges per ticket. While that might sound like a logical idea at first, a look at the equity of this equation will show that this is unreasonable.
Why do music artists want to use your photographs? They want to attract fans who will buy their records and buy tickets to their concerts. Let’s do some math with respect to this idea of charging a license fee per image equal to the price of a ticket. Assume a well known artist charges $50 per ticket, and your corresponding license fee is $50 per image per year. Next, let’s say this well known artist plays 100 dates a year and sells 5000 tickets per date. In a one year tour, the music artist grosses 100 x 5000 x $50 or $25 million. Yes, I said $25 million.
This really big discrepancy applies to a well known artist. So let’s see how this applies to a small artist. Assume a small artist charges $20 per ticket, plays 50 dates a year, and sells 200 tickets per show. This artist grosses $200,000 per year. Does a $20 license fee per image sound fair when the artist is making $200,000 per year?
Why charge the price of a ticket per photograph when bands are grossing 10,000 times that or more? Where is the equity in this equation? Charging 10 times the ticket price would be more equitable for a small band. For a well known artist, even 10 times the ticket price is inequitable. Remember that music artists want to use your photographs to boost ticket and record sales.
When a music artist says they cannot afford to pay a fair license fee for your photograph, ask them how many dates they play a year, how many tickets they sell per date, how much they charge per ticket. Then show them how much that is relative to how much they are asking you to accept. This inequity should help convince them that you deserve more.
