Starting a Business | Sound and Music 2/5/13 2:57 PM

Starting a Business
It is possible to make a living from selling the skills you acquired by being an artist. Your skills as
a sound technician, sound designer and composer can be used in commercial productions. You
can develop a business from your work in freelance production and develop a business network.
It is important to manage both the money-making and creative side of your practice.

Also see: Composing and Arranging for Media, Film and TV, http://mediamusicforum.com/

Case Study

Tom Haines, Brains & Hunch

What is Brains & Hunch? How did you first start out?

Brains & Hunch is a music house representing composers Tom Haines and Chris Branch. The
business was started (under another name) in 2000, shortly after we graduated in composition /
electronic music from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Initially, we got a small loan (£1100) from The Prince's Trust, with which we bought a Pro Tools
001 and a pair of speakers, which enabled us to do the work. In the first year, we scored a hand-
ful of TV adverts, our first play and a paid film job. The proceeds from these jobs went towards
buying a bit more equipment and putting a deposit down on a basement near Brick lane that we
turned into our first studio. We leased this room for three years. The Musician’s Union and The
Prince's Trust were both instrumental in planning and providing advice in this first attempt at
our music business.

We didn’t draw any wages from the business during the first five years. All the proceeds went
into studio rent, running costs, equipment purchases and musicians' fees. Chris and I both made
our living from leading music workshops in schools and peripatetic music teaching. We planned
our diaries so one of us would always be available to do studio work if it came in. We worked a
lot in the evening and at weekends to make ends meet.

In 2006, we felt that we had enough regular business and a good enough show-reel to start to
work full time as Brains & Hunch and stop our part-time jobs. We took a small business loan
from the East London Small Business Centre (as the bank would not give us one), and have been
working full time as Brains and Hunch since then.

We have never wanted the stress of trying to make our art practice our bread and butter, so we
elected very early on to make ends meet through teaching and commercial work, which in turn
supplements and takes the pressure off our art practice. The main thing that made setting up our
business possible was being able to do tuition and music workshop leading on a freelance basis
whilst we were building up our business client base.

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What kind of work do you do? How do you manage multiple projects and vari-
ous kinds of projects?

We have done all sorts of things in the past 10 years:

Music and sound for animation

Music and sound for film / TV / video
Music / sound for theatre
Musical / sound performances.
Sound installations
Teaching music / talks on music and sound

We find that working as a duo has vastly increased our ability to work on lots of projects
simultaneously. We have not only got a larger skill set working in a team, we can also be in two
places at once. This is very useful as projects can easily overrun into time earmarked for other
things. Having two people instead of one can buffer these potential clashes very effectively. We
also set out how much time we are allocating to a commercial project when we quote and eventu-
ally contract for it.

How do you find the balance between your artistic practice and your com-
mercial work?

We have always tried to balance our artistic practice with our commercial work. We use the com-
mercial work we do to fund non-commercial projects, which we need to do as artists, but which
pay little or no money.

Our commercial work seems to be getting closer to what we make as artists. I hope this is be-
cause people commission us because we are good at a certain type of thing. There are a few
things I know about the balance: if we weren’t having fun doing non-commercial work I don’t
think anyone would employ us to do the paid stuff. No one commissions people who aren’t en-
joying what they are doing. Our current music project is a band in which we make sci-fi cartoon
music. This is certainly very close to our main source of commercial income, which is making
music and sound for animation. I think commercial work and non-commercial work can live
happily side by side. It is important to recognise that each of them needs time! We have found
that this is the trickiest balance to make.

What is the expected rate for projects?

Every project is different. In order to quote for projects we always use the rates of pay set out by
the MU and also PCAM, both of which are incredibly helpful to their writer members.

Society for Producers and Composers of Applied Music

PCAM is an organisation for practitioners of advertising music that provides support for com-

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posers working in advertising. The website provides guidelines for fees, contracts and market
rates for musicians and singers.

Musicians' Union
Musicians' Union provides guidelines for media rates and agreements on their website.

What is the process of developing a project from start to finish?

Example: Writing the music for an advert

1. Contract
Before any work is undertaken we will negotiate what the usage of the advert is going to be and
what the budget is. At this point, in discussing the brief we will get an idea of the number of mu-
sicians and singers we will need to employ, and what resources and time commitment we will
have to make. Allowance for paying people properly is always made. We stick to the guidelines
laid out by the Musicians' Union and PCAM in quoting and charging for work.

2. Demo
Once we have received a clear enough brief and spoken to the client to get as clear an under-
standing as possible of what they want, we will compose and record an initial version (or
versions) of the track and sound to either a rough cut of the sequence or a story board. This is
then sent back to the client for feedback. This usually happens within 2 to 3 days of being com-
missioned to pitch for the work.

A lot of projects involve writing demos; all demos should be paid for on commercial projects! An
average advert demo fee will be between £100 and £500. Always try and get a good clear brief.
There are usually a few composers commissioned to write for an advert, so you need to get used
to your tracks getting rejected in favour of something else!

3. Delivering the Job

There are usually several rounds of feedback, so there are nearly always last-minute rewrites and
tweaks to do. Once everyone has agreed that the track is right, a final mix must be done and the
sound must be delivered in the appropriate format.

4. PRS registration
The track must now be properly registered with the PRS so that royalties generated from TV /
radio / cinema performances can be properly distributed.

How can you sustain a practice and get more work?

Teaching

Part-time tuition work can be flexible, pay well and be very closely related to your art practice,
and very rewarding. For example, as a freelancer, I gave composition tuition in schools in East

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London for GCSE and A Level students. I used to get great results from getting my students to
score sections of films using the techniques they had to use as part of the syllabus. For example,
I found that teaching 12 tone techniques in the context of scoring a creepy horror film sequence
would suddenly unlock meaning in the exercise for students that may not have had any previous
interest in anything classical.

Networks and Collaboration

Most of our commissions have come indirectly from working on non-commercial projects and
meeting people. We have made a large network of people with similar interests and over a wide
range of disciplines over the years. This extended network of people is key in making our prac-
tice work for us. Nearly all of our commissions involve a collaboration of some sort, whether that
is with a group of actors or an animation director. The more people we have collaborated with,
the bigger our network has become. Making sure we keep our network of clients and friends
abreast of what we are up to and when we are performing, etc. is key in keeping people interest-
ed in working with us.

Show Reels / Demos

Our bread and butter is our show reel. Having a high-quality and up-to-date document of our
work is essential when going out and looking for commissions. When you meet up with a poten-
tial client, you have to show them something you are excited about. The game is then to inspire
them into commissioning you!

Getting Meetings

This is undoubtedly the hardest thing of all. We have spent the last 10 years researching poten-
tial clients and trying to get meetings with them. In fact, that is what we are doing this week. It is
a time-consuming but essential operation. In our experience, it is next to useless emailing or
cold-calling potential clients with no previous point of contact. Show-reels or demos usually go
onto a shelf or straight into the bin unless you have personally given it to someone. We have only
managed to get someone to listen to a reel or a demo if we have managed to meet with them face
to face. When we first started out we would go and knock on people's doors and try to meet
them. The people we have ended up being commissioned by have been people we have managed
to meet up with. We have never got a job through mail-outs or cold calling. The reason for this is
simple: people commission humans, not an envelope with a DVD in it.

Show-reel work

We made a lot of contacts through doing work for free on student films and low- or no-budget
shorts. A lot of this work came through friends at art colleges and film school, but we also made
a lot of good contacts through sites like: www.shootingpeople.com

Tom Haines, Brains & Hunch

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Tom Haines, Brains & Hunch

Tom Haines is a composer who works in TV, film and theatre. He studied composition at the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Tom runs a music production company with fellow com-
poser Chris Branch. His recent film work includes a score for feature film Buried Land, which
premiered this year at Tribeca film festival. His recent non-commercial work includes perform-
ing and writing with music ensembles Quartet Electronische, The London Snorkelling Team and
Filter Theatre.

www.brainsandhunch.com
www.tomhaines.co.uk

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