HOW DO I PUT A PRICE TO MY ART?

One of the trickiest thing in the creative industries is defining the value of the work we do and determining what to charge for it. When you are asked the question, "What do you do?" and you find yourself saying "I am a clerk but I play in a band on the side." not mentioning your art form as primary, you are always going to under price your art. From the moment I turned into a professional musician as opposed to a competent amateur, the question of what to charge for my services and products has been a recurring puzzle. Once I think I have figured it out, something changes in the industry, these days mostly the technology, which requires a rethink. Recently, I attended an arts business seminar which made me revisit this question; How do I set my price?

This dilemma affects musicians, painters, designers, dancers, film makers, actors etc... Anyone who works in a creative capacity will have come across this once they got past the point of enthusiastic amateur and crossed over to the thorny side of "I want to pay my bills by the fruit of my artistic sweat ".

Some of us just look at existing models and do what others do without questioning how they came to a certain price point but simply accepting it is the going rate for a given creative service or product. In doing this we sometimes find we have heavily under priced and get into a situation where we are operating at a loss. Others put a lot of vested emotion on to the product and end up over pricing or not being able to define any kind of price at all! Saying ironic stuff like "My work is too valuable, I can't put a price to it." In other instances emotions and a desire for one's works to gain exposure, pushes some artists to really under price or even give works away for free only to later get stuck in a perpetually low price bracket that is sometimes hard to escape. Here, I am not talking about promotional give-aways but about an artist giving away free services or products with only the idea of dissemination and no plan to monetize those works. Just being happy that people are consuming the work. Apparently, one does it "for the love." If this is what you do then I would say your art is a fanciful hobby not a profession.

Begging to Exhibit Art

There are numerous instances in Kampala that musicians and other performers from varying disciplines have been expected to pay in order for them to perform. Incredibly, the artists yield to this exploitation under the delusion that they will gain exposure. Ironically, a venue will promise exposure yet expect you to be the one to bring people to it, meaning it is the artist exposing the venue to his/her fans; and the artist is paying for this "privilege" whilst also providing free entertainment as an added value for the venue. Its like a triple loss!

1. You spend to advertise and draw your fans to the venue
2. Spend to prepare and deliver a free  performance
3. Then with a sheepish smile you pay to perform, in the hope that this is improving your career.

This scenario is full of so many ironies that it is no longer ironic but plain foolish! Many venues in Kampala pay some kind of performance fee for example but even then the fee is so small in relation to the costs that the equation remains the same; the artist is paying to exhibit their work! I know a venue that pays 350,000 Ug shillings for a 3hr band performance but note that a decent PA for a small set up starts at 450,00 shillings. So 350,000 can hardly be termed as performance fee if it can't even cover the equipment being used! This situation happens even in big cities like London, New York and LA. The problem of artists not getting or even knowing our worth is universal. 

Looking at Reality

Considering  painters, in Van Gogh times, the business model was

• Sum up material costs (brushes, paint and canvas)
• Sum up the hours taken to create the art piece & multiply by a given hourly rate.
• Add that up to get the price of the piece. 

This works but it is a simplistic way to look at it. If one is to look beyond the surface, this should just be the starting point in defining your price.

It is important to consider the going rates for your given service or product but this needs to be realistically balanced with your costs. One should also consider at what level their standing is in their field. You may just be starting up and trying to demand fees of a seasoned professional just because you heard so and so charge the same or because someone praised your talent and so you believe you are "worth it". That may well be so but it is better to start low and slowly build the charges up as demand for your work increases. As your reputation and brand grows so do your fees; should the reputation and brand decline, so will the fees.

I remember when I had just set-up to do some sound production work in Uganda. I came with a price that was absolutely ridiculous for a Ugandan musician to pay. I made two big mistakes. First, my services and level of skill at delivering them wasn't known but since I had already been working in the field I assumed my reputation would carry me along. Wrong! Different environment different rules. Secondly, I was used to much higher hourly rates in Europe only to find that in Uganda people paid per project regardless of how many hours invested. A song production done in 2 hrs is charged the same as one which includes a week of pre-production! It was insane! I couldn't reconcile this difference and so I found it impossible to work. I was left with two options, to drastically  lower my fees and work at a loss and proceed to bankruptcy since I put in practically 10 times more man-hours than most of the competition. Or, normalise the price to the local industry standard and also normalise the hours right down to the bare minimum and claw back some profit. Problem was, if I lowered the hours, the quality of the work was bound to suffer in such a way that clients I may have attracted would not get what they hoped for since I wasn't able to reach optimum quality in the low hours. So I risked ruining my reputation and denting the artistic values that I stand for. So, I took the third non-option; put production work on ice. 

I'm not saying that close up shop on your art but one has to be pragmatic. What I did was this:

• I searched and waited for a climate that needed my kind of services; people who were willing to pay that little bit extra to get these services.
• I carefully looked at what I do and streamlined it to remove any unnecessary processes or costs that aren't critical at this juncture as well as trying to squeeze down hours of labour
• I built up other services that were originally secondary and I made them more prominent since their costs were less
• I also sought out clients and projects that are likely to be good representations of what I do so as to build the brand on the market and create more demand for my services.

All these little things affect my fixing of  the price and how a potential client views that price. 

This is a small example of how complex it can be to price art products and services. My process is by no means perfect, its something I am continually working on because as recent as last year I priced a project only to reach midway in execution and realise I had under-priced by practically 50%! This happens a lot to bands and gig men, film-makers and TV producers, fashion designers etc It is something we should continually assess to be sure that we remain in tune with our clients' expectations and the lay of the industry in which we are engaged. It is easier if one can afford the cost of consulting a professional finance expert. But in the absence of such expertise we professional artists must be sharp about these things otherwise one risks the question "What do you really do?"

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