Commissions fail to provide a living for most composers, who earn on average less than £4k a year for this work.
Two-thirds of composers do not earn a significant income from commissions, according to new research. The 466 respondents to a Composer Commissioning Survey conducted by Sound and Music, the national agency for new music, earned an average fee per commission of £1,392 in 2013, but were only paid for an average of 2.65 commissions that year. Established composers who had been seeking commissions for 5 or more years earned only an extra £87 a year on average. They were likely to get more commissions but be paid less per commission. Those represented by publishers and agents tended to be more successful at getting work.
The research was initiated following an increase in anecdotal evidence about the worsening environment for the creation of new music. Sound and Music found that the top 1% of composers surveyed earned a quarter of the total income from all commissions, whose value ranged from just £1 to over £100,000. One respondent commented: “The most well-paid commissions I receive come from projects with at least some element outside of music. This suggests that non-music organisations frequently value the work done by composers than music organisations do. In these projects there is rarely the assumption that composers should do any part of their work for free, but within music organisations this is often the assumption.” The survey findings reflect some experiences in the visual arts, where the Paying Artists campaign is aiming to improve pay levels for visual artists who exhibit in publicly-funded galleries.