Here’s How Much Audio Pros Are Making

Everyone is always curious how much money others are making. It’s a good gauge as to your potential, and if your pocketbook is a lighter than it should be. Pro Tools Expert recently conducted a survey to discover just what audio pros are currently making, and as with most surveys, some things were shocking and others not so much. Keep in mind that the results are international, although some categories are broken down by country.

A Baseline

First of all 56% of the respondents reported that they were involved in post-production, which generally has deeper pockets than music production.

The respondents varied in age from under 21 to 60+ years old, with the bulk being in the 30 to 50 year old range.

Keep in mind that we’re not talking about the 0.1% that are lucky enough to work with superstar artists, who are in an entirely different category.

The Nitty Gritty

As stated above, post has much deeper pockets and that’s shown by the split in income:

• Music production – $36,191.58
• Post production – $55,221.91

That means that the average income is $45,082.77.

It gets more interesting if we look at income via country:

• USA – $55,859.93 ($48,389.93)*
• Canada – $54,962.26
• United Kingdom – $52,396.69
• Europe – $33,666.67
• Australia & New Zealand – $50,173.08
• Rest of World – $22,378.38

The reason for the asterisk in the USA category income is that the amount is actually around $7,500 lower when you take health care costs into consideration. The other countries provided free or near free health care.

While there were a fair percentage (12%) of the respondents that reported income over $100,000, the highest percentage (24%) reported an income of less than $10,000 per year in income. That’s scary in that the figure is well below the poverty line in all of the countries mentioned above.

Now this isn’t so bad if you’re offering audio services part-time, but it does illustrate the point that we’re all in an entrepreneurial business. Audio pros make their own jobs, need to market themselves, and need to network both in-person and online in order to stay busy. Brilliance only goes so far, as does word-of-mouth. The old adage of needing to spend 25% of your time on marketing applies more now than ever.

There’s a lot more useful information in the survey, so check it out here.

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