Award Sounds

The industries of Stock Photography and Stock Music have a lot of similarities.

Stock Agencies

Both rely on artists submitting their creations to agencies. The agencies are changing the way in which the artists interact with the customers of the art. Importantly for the artist, the agencies are devaluing the art resulting in the art becoming commoditised. Unfortunately, the artist is at the end of the chain and is also becoming commoditised.

Time

In the article Stock Music at Stock Photography Prices, Lee Pritchard suggests that writing music for agencies takes more time than taking photographs and therefore composers should receive a higher income for their work than photographers. I think a lot of people would agree with that opinion, but much of that comes down to the abundance of image-creating gadgets. Nearly everyone has a phone with a built-in camera, some have small compact cameras and some have DSLRs. However only a small minority of these plan a photo shoot. And therein lies one difference: there's more to generating a regular, healthy income from photography than just pressing the shutter button.

I agree that music takes longer to create than images. It does take longer to produce a single 3 minute piece of music than a single photo. A second difference is that a photo shoot can produce a number of images whereas after creating a 3 minute piece of music, that's all you have. Yes, you can slice it and arrange it into different versions for 5 seconds, 29 seconds, etc, but it's still based on the same piece of music, restricting what you can do with it.

Cost of Entry

A third difference is the relative differences in the cost of entry to a professional level.

A standard photographer's kit would include a decent pro-DSLR, a number of lenses, tripod & head, carrying bag, computer with photo editing and management software.

A composer is also likely to be musician and recording engineer and the cheap microphone on your laptop or your mp3 player/recorder is rarely good enough to create a sellable recording. So the composer will need instruments/amplifiers, microphones, stands, cables, keyboard, computer with sequencing/composing software sufficient to be Digital Audio Workstation, audio interface, processors (at minimum one stereo compressor/limiter, one stereo eq, one stereo reverb). Although you can do a lot with just an Apple Macbook, the results will be limited.

Luxury

The 4th difference can be found between just taking a photo of something you happen to be walking past and planning a complete photo shoot.

Composers hardly ever have the same luxury of just pressing the recording switch. From an audio perspective, rather than music, they could record traffic, the sound of a helicopter passing overhead, etc. However, to get a decent, useable product at the end still requires better equipment and knowledge than the starting musician will have. More importantly, a composer will have to create (i.e. compose) what they want to record in advance of the recording. That takes time, skill and experience.

Numbers

A 5th difference is in the ratio of keepers to rejects. Photography starts out being about taking a number of photos and selecting which images to keep and process further. Writing music has a different ratio. In addition, when recording you're more likely to know earlier in the process whether you'll keep the take or not. Amateur photographers tend to photograph everything then separate out the good from the bad later, if they separate it out at all. The more experienced a photographer becomes, the better that ratio becomes and, optionally, the more files they'll delete in the field.

Future Direction

Music has been heading the same devalued route as photography for a while. The entry point for generating an income (usually a small one) from images is still lower than for music. I still believe it's equally difficult to become an experienced, well-respected professional in either domain, but it's quicker and easier to get started in photography.

The royalty-free market and subscription models are vastly reducing the revenues generated for artists, faster than the cost of entry is reducing.

Bespoke

There's still a market for bespoke, custom artistic creation. Can you imagine if the music for Intel's new signature ident was also being used for your local car repairer? (By the way, I've no idea if Intel do have a new ident, but they currently have a recognisable ident that is only used by them).

Activities

Have a look at my comparison of the activities involved and let me know your thoughts. I've attached the pdf files below.

License for the attached document