Pricing Reality?

[mackstack]

Is anyone finding the fees people are charging in there field absurd?

This is mainly with regards to songwriting/composition & production. (My Forte)

These fee’s are freakishly low and seem to be completely compromising those who wish to peruse let alone maintain a professional career in the creative industries.

How can anyone write, arrange and produce/mix an adequate recording for like a few bucks?

Are you nuts…? I’d wanna pay proper money for that service or at least pay for something reassuring expensive.

Crafting a original song/composition and then producing PROPERLY (with real mics and decent pre-amps, expensive instruments and not just using chepo VST synthy tracks) it is a highly skilled art that takes years to develop with lots of time, financial and academic investment.

The final insult is giving away I.P rights to the work. (Is this because it is rubbish anyway?)

With this sort of freelance your all shooting yourselves in the foot!!

YOU THE ARTISTS SHOULD DICTATE THE RATES not the labor exploiting customers!!

Sorry for the rant, I’m just new to this site.

[silberma1976]

Its a buyer’s market. Basic economics. Supply outweighs demand. Prices are lower as a result. I see it in the buyer request in my categories. The expectation is to got a whole lot for close to nothing. I wish those buyers the best of luck with quality. In many cases, I will put in my higher price bid and get a message from the buyer that they tried some other gigs, and the quality sucked, so they are coming to me. All balances out in the end.

[mackstack]

The sad thing is that those who pay for these services do not know what good quality production value is. They now just except something poorly made as good quality. They know no different.

It seems that everyone these days is a music producer, film maker, photographer etc and its only with experience and or education in your relevant discipline that you see the utter garbage passing for “Professional”.

To move fwd you either have to massively compromise on quality or stay subject to ongoing exploitation.

This dilemma seems to regularly present itself to those in the music industry.

I think the ethical decision is perhaps not to participate in something that is unhealthy for the future of those within your career.

[jjonesbooks]

I’ve had the same experience with buyers who’ve tried to pay low prices (like $5 total for several 500 words articles- absurd) prior to ordering from me. When they do buck up and pay a more fair price (and honestly, my prices are still pretty low as I am fairly new here), they find that it’s worth it.

But yes, it’s frustrating to see Buyer’s Requests in price ranges that are just not realistic. In some cases, those requests might be picked up by new sellers offering work at low prices just to get orders/reviews, but in others the work will be farmed out and/or completed at a low quality. Some of those dissatisfied buyers will leave Fiverr altogether, but others will come back ready to pay a fair price for higher quality work.

[Guest phantompower]

Are you arguing as a buyer or a seller? If you are a seller, then no one has forced you to lower the price in the first place. If you are a seller you can always go ahead and look for the one who is charging the highest and purchase from them. All in all I always tell my buyer, you get what you pay for. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you pay me 5$ to create something big, you will get a big load of sh*t. If you up to 50$ and above this is when we can start talking about something close to greatness.

[speedy876]

One way to look at it is to start small and build the empire. Most sellers here know the value of their work; however, to remain competitive in your target market/platform, you must start within the range of your competitors. Yes, it may be a little uncomfortable doing a $50 job for only $10 at first, but the key thing is, in the real world (outside of Fiverr), one may get one such order for the week = $50, whereas on Fiverr, one may get one such order for the day due to the extensive exposure and clientele ($70/ 7 days). The point of this is to first get competitive, then as the orders start to pile on, you can raise your prices gradually, until it is close to, or even beyond the actual market value.

Truth be told, there are sellers here who have their most standard package starting at $300, with lots of orders in their queue. but being very realistic, they couldn’t have done that when they just started; the possibility exists they would be a Fiverr Seller today after 3 years of joining with Zero sales.

Hope this helps.

Slow progress is better than no progress.

Cheers,
Speedy876

[mackstack]

In response to phantompower:

I guess I’m a seller.
I’ve just set up a temp profile to see what this site is about.

You have a point in saying “you are not forced to lower the price” however from my brief observation of the website it appears that we are being forced into exploitation labor and its because of the very low pricing dictated by the very people (artists) who work in the industry.
Their pricing is insane. Its just not possible in a million years to comprehend let alone considering to compete with.
Perhaps they need to re-evaluate their self worth?

I mean seriously… £4 odd…, I wouldn’t even open up Logic for that!!

Very few buyers are going to bother paying a proper industry rate for work because there is a wealth of artists out there willing to work for peanuts and some will no doubt create high quality work for such money. They will then have fueled the buyers expectations for paying peanuts thus creating future jobs to be priced even lower and a market further saturated with incompetent frauds who do not know what they are doing.

I have over 17yrs experience in songwriting & composition.
13yrs recording experience and have been consistently gigging the same.
I have a Hons degree in music with a composition as my first study.
I have two separate businesses both with websites that involve composition & recording.

I know for a fact I’d be very hard pushed to knock out a decent composition and record it well in one day. I’d like a week minimum.

Here is an example of a pretty cheap/going rate adequate recording session:
I will spend a day with a well rehearsed band to record one song and still not properly begin mixing or have vocals down. The end result is a good (Demo) that still really should be mastered professionally by somewhere reputable. I only master if requested but its not proper mastering. That’s beyond my expertise. This is my reality of recording. Around £200 a day 8-10hrs and not even having to create my own intellectual property.

Creating some new work for a customer is a whole other level of labor that’s hard to quantify in monetary terms because unlike engineering a recording its a lot harder to accurately gauge its completion time.

Perhaps regulation is needed to set the bar for a fare rate so actual skilled people are not scared off by the prospect of working for insulting fee’s. Perhaps also some credentials check like a number of years experience, education and having a website may also be considered? It may be enough to deter those who are ruining their very own industry for themselves and everyone else.

Speedy876:
When I look at if your way, you do have a valid point.
The cynic in me see’s this site as a total hassle, headache and complete time waster and for absolute crap money but I like your optimism.

I’ll give it a go but I’m gonna have to price the shit out of stuff!! (Ethical Living Wage)😉

[speedy876]

@mackstack - sounds good, start with something reasonable for your basic $5 package, maybe some advice and something easy, then in your standard package, offer something for $50 and maybe $100 for premium deal and see how it goes. You may need to add lots of portfolio samples to gain a little trust seeing you will be just a beginner in the eyes of the buyers until you have a little reputation here (Remember everyone will have the option to write-up some belly-bulging experience (fact/not), but the order reviews are what people take seriously, so start small, then work your way up to a $200 package if you will.

All the best!

Regards
Speedy876

[misscrystal]

we are being forced into exploitation labor

No one is being forced to do anything. If you want to build up a reputation as a top seller, you have the chance to do that. You put in the time charging very little until you build a great reputation. Then you can charge more and people will gladly pay more, knowing you are the best.

[eoinfinnegan]

@speedy876 is right, it takes time to build up a reputation to enable you to price what you are worth. In my work, it took two months to get enough work where I could increase my prices, before that I was working for around one third of my country’s minimum wage. Now, a year later I charge properly for my work on Fiverr and get a reasonable amount of work here.
There will always be people who are cheaper than you, you just have to be able to justify your prices and you will get clients. Offline, that means a lot of meetings face to face, an ability to sell yourself well, networking etc etc… Count up the number of hours spent doing that before you get an order (including those waste of time meetings and no-shows) and the big fee you get suddenly seems a lot less.
On Fiverr you need to put in the work at highly discounted rates but at least you are getting paid something for your efforts. By putting in time and effort you will get there but don’t sell yourself short. Remember, repeat buyers are golden here. I have a client who initially bought when I started and has given me roughly an order per week since then. I told them about price increases and they didnt have a problem with it aside from a small negotiation. We settled on me giving them a faster than standard delivery time but at the increased prices. Totally worth it for such a consistent buyer who is easy to deal with.

[speedy876]

Very good point as well - the repeat buyers are basically what keep most existing sellers going. Continuous sales for years. Can’t get much better than that in addition to the new buyers every week.

Regards,
Speedy876