What Custom Music for a Commercial Costs.

Why this is so hard to find out

Music and audio post pricing is one of the least transparent corners of production, and that is not an accident of the industry being small. Almost every quote is genuinely bespoke, because the same piece of music carries a different value depending entirely on how it will be used — and studios are reluctant to publish a number that a client will anchor to before the usage is known.

The result is that a producer trying to build a budget has very little to work from. Search for what custom music costs and the top results are largely personalised-song and wedding-song services answering a completely different question. So the figures below are gathered from the few companies that do publish, and each one is attributed to whoever published it. None of them is a quote from us, and none should be treated as one.

Published rates, attributed

Public figures from companies that publish them, current as of September 2026:

• Swell Music + Sound publishes custom library tracks from $5,000 and scored originals with demos from $10,000
• Dallas Audio Post publishes a full rate card: $175 per hour for editorial and stereo mixing, $250 per hour for a full-service voiceover session, $300 per hour for theatrical Dolby stage mixing, $350 per role for full-service voice casting, and $750 flat for a fully produced voiceover demo — with a one-hour minimum, then 30-minute increments
• Clutch reports the average hourly rate for audio production companies on its directory at $100 to $149
• Practitioners writing in industry forums put custom music for advertising across a $2,000 to $50,000 band, and sonic logos and mnemonics at $20,000 to $60,000 and up, depending on the client and the usage
• For comparison on the licensing side: online-only library tracks commonly run $29 to $150, broadcast-cleared production library music roughly $500 to $5,000, and a sync licence for a well-known song from a major label $10,000 to $500,000

What drives the number

In rough order of how much each one moves a quote. The first four are all the same question — how much use are you buying:

• Media — online only, broadcast, cinema, out-of-home, in-store. Each additional medium is a real increment, and broadcast is the largest step.
• Territory — one country, a region, or worldwide
• Term — six months, one year, three years, or perpetuity, and whether it renews automatically
• Exclusivity and ownership — a licence within limits, or a full buyout of master and composition
• Production scale — programmed versus live musicians. Booking players, a room and an engineer is a real cost line, and it is the one clients most often assume is included.
• Scope of deliverables — how many durations, how many cut-downs, whether stems are included, whether alternate mixes are needed
• Revisions — how many rounds are inside the fee and what counts as a round
• Turnaround — genuine compression of a schedule displaces other work and is normally priced

The mistake that costs the most

It is not paying too much for the music. It is scoping the usage too narrowly at the start and extending it later.

A track licensed or commissioned for a six-month regional online campaign, which then performs well and gets taken to broadcast, or extended to another territory, or simply kept running, has to be re-cleared. That negotiation happens at the moment of success, when the campaign is already live and the alternative to agreeing is pulling it. The leverage is entirely one-sided and the price reflects that.

The defence is cheap and takes one line in the brief: state the widest use the campaign could plausibly reach, and price that at the start even if you commission the narrow version. Knowing what the extension would cost before you need it is worth more than the small saving from not asking.

Getting a quote that is comparable

Quotes from different studios are frequently not comparable, and the difference is rarely the music. It is what is inside the number. One quote includes stems, three durations and two revision rounds; another quotes the master alone and bills the rest.

To make them comparable, send every studio the same short list: the durations and versions you need, whether stems and an M&E are included, the revision allowance and what counts as a round, the loudness target and delivery format, and the full usage — media, territories, term, exclusivity. A studio that cannot quote against that list has not understood the job, which is itself useful information.