Almost every deliverable ships with sound. Almost no agency prices it. How can hours nobody bills become a price everyone accepts?
Agencies normally price work in hours, and music is the cost that never appears on the estimate. Someone on the team searches for a track, checks whether the license covers paid social in two markets, swaps the track when clearance can’t be confirmed, then does it all again for the next client.
None of that time gets billed. It just disappears into the project. However, there’s a fix.
The cost of music sourcing sits in the hours, not the fees
The visible music spend is the license fee. The invisible spend is far larger and sits in the hours put into sourcing and clearing a track for every deliverable. Search time, clearance checks, re-edits when a track fails review, message threads asking who approved what, usage checks when a campaign extends to a new market, and the same search repeated because nobody logged last quarter’s choice.
Small tasks, repeated for every deliverable, for every client.
Asana’s 2023 Anatomy of Work Global Index found that office professionals spend 58% of their day on “work about work”. That covers the coordinating, the searching for information, and the chasing of status, everything around the job that isn’t the job.
Music sourcing at an agency is a concentrated version of exactly that. Where the cost lands depends on how you price.
On fixed fees: the hours come straight out of margin. A campaign film is scoped at forty hours. Track search and clearance add three more. The invoice still says forty; the team worked forty-three.
On retainers: they come out of capacity you would otherwise sell. A team that gives an afternoon a week to music admin works that afternoon for free, every week, all year.
Before changing the estimate, track those tasks across a few projects. Separate music selection from clearance and revisions, then calculate the internal cost of the time spent. That gives the agency a baseline for deciding whether a subscription saves enough time to justify its fee.
Either way, the instinctive answer is the same: bill those music-related hours.
It doesn’t work.
Why billing for music sourcing hours doesn’t work
Most clients won’t accept those line items. Track search and related soundtracking work read as overhead, not craft, and the estimate that includes it loses the pitch. It’s comparable to charging for the time it takes to prepare the invoice: real work, indeed, but not the work the client is buying.
Even if you had clients willing to pay for search and clearance as line items, a second problem remains: billing changes who pays, but the hours still get spent. The team still searches, still clears, still re-edits.
Buy music the way you buy software
The fix is to swap the unpredictable hours for one predictable price.
That’s what treating music like software means. Agencies already buy software this way. One subscription, a known cost, seats and permissions for the whole team, covering work for every client. Bought that way, music becomes the one version of this cost that actually fits on an estimate.
It fits because clients don’t refuse to pay for music. They refuse to pay for process.
A license is a cost of the deliverable, the same category as stock footage or a font license, and agencies pass those through or price them into the rate card every day. Search hours, however, are workflow, and nobody buys workflow.
To price it in, allocate the subscription cost across the projects or retainers that use it. An agency might include an agreed music allowance in its production fee or build the allocation into its rates. Explain what that allowance covers upfront, so the client understands the charge before approving the estimate.
The subscription also shrinks the hours themselves. One approved, pre-cleared source means shorter searches, clearance settled once instead of per track, and fewer re-edits from failed reviews.
In practice, that source becomes the agency’s pre-approved music library: one place every team, freelancer included, pulls from for every client.
What remains is a small, known cost. And small, known costs get priced in, where hours went unbilled.
What should a music subscription for client work cover?
It should cover the work you deliver to clients, not only the content you publish for yourself. That translates to three main checks:
- First, client usage: the license must explicitly cover deliverables made for third parties, across every platform and market the client publishes in.
- Second, continuity: content already published should stay cleared after the engagement or the subscription ends, so a campaign shipped in March doesn’t need re-licensing in November.
- Third, rights structure: most commercial tracks have several rights holders. A label owns the recording, publishers own the composition, collecting societies handle the royalties. Each adds terms to check before every use, so fewer rights holders means less checking.
What is the best music subscription for agencies covering client work?
For most agencies, the answer is Epidemic Sound, the world’s leading soundtracking platform, and the company that introduced the industry’s first creator subscription back in 2015.
Here’s how an Epidemic Sound subscription answers each check for agency work:
- Client usage: client work is covered in the license itself, not negotiated per project. The subscription tier sets how far that reaches, up to Enterprise agreements spanning every platform, broadcast included, and every market a client publishes in.
- Continuity: published content stays cleared permanently, whether or not the subscription continues. The campaign that shipped in March needs nothing from you in November.
- Rights structure: Epidemic Sound owns its artist-created tracks outright and licenses them with all rights included, public performance rights among them. Its artists aren’t signed up with performance rights organizations, so there are no separate royalty fees to administer later.
The effect on the hours is direct. The clearance work disappears. It’s answered once, in the agreement, instead of once per track.
The search work shrinks. AI-powered tools match tracks to a plain-language brief and adapt them to the length of the edit, so finding usable music takes minutes instead of an afternoon. The tools find and shape the tracks, and artists make them.
What’s left is the subscription fee. And that one goes on the estimate.
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