Okay, my rant may be slightly random but this topic made me think about the value of music and the expectaions people have about what it should cost.

I don't do free music very often - it's just not practical if you are trying to make a living that way.

In 2005 the going rate for a (not famous) name was $1,000/minute of completed final work in the game industry with the film industry not to far off.

Every score composer I knew personally was spending a minimum of $1,000 a year on new sample libraries, with most doing much more (and that`s not including the thousands of dollars to establish an initial palette or the computer or recording hardware or maintenence).

Hiring good session players tends to start $100/hr minimum and recording a full orchestra is at least $10,000 around here.

Rent in L.A. also is not cheap. Add up these costs it`s easy to have to make $40,000+ a year living on your own and still have no disposable income or savings to speak of.

And the difference between having music composed for your film specifically vs. tossing in pre-composed music can be really huge, let alone between score and nothing. The Oscars did a great job of showing that with the opening to Chariots of Fire in the 80s.

Anyway, I do offer discounts on my rates for indie productions but I do not like doing free (it`s the very occassional gift to close friends) because I like continuing to make music more than I like getting my power turned off, not being able to pay rent or running put of gas money or running out of food (and those are things that I have watched happen to my friends in the industry over the last 7 years at various points).

If you are going to ask someone to score something for you and can't give monetary compensation, try to find out what else they might really want or need so that you can offer that. Randomly offering something they don't need and then getting frustrated if they don't take you up on it isn't a winning combo.

Anyway, end rant but my last word is "value the music, whether you can pay for it or not". :)

You can download my songs from Pynkhouse.com or search for ''King KeNoah'' on your Android devices

@videohq Sorry, more specifically, what bit depth, what sample frequency, and beyond that; If someone wants to work with surround sound, what format and file type would be best?

@everyone... can the files you guys are using use DSD?

I am going to be exploring storage places at the moment. So far, I'm looking at Audionautix, Soundcloud, Free Music Archive, Freesound, and Bandcamp. From what @jodydb says, bandcamp sounds nice.

I would suggest using the site bandcamp, I use it to host audio files because its variety of players that you can embed. Bandcamp is free and forces the upload of wav files or higher, which can be downloaded by the user into what ever format they desire. Its a really slick system, you can track downloads, build mailing list, have things free - user picks price - or set amount, and account are free.