The Pitch Culture

Over the last couple of decades, it has become quite common practice in the entire "commercial creative" industry to get hired for a job after pitching for it.

For a client, this practice reduces the risk. Basically, they let several creatives provide their ideas for the project and pick the one that is most in line with what they envisioned and hire that person to do the entire project.

However, this practice has lead to a partially massively exploitive industry. It is not uncommon for some clients to request the creatives (or specifically composers) to deliver a pitch not only for their initial idea but for the entire project and at the same time only pay the winning pitch.

This phenomenon is particularly big in the commercial/advertising world, where many composers keep pitching for projects only winning every 5th or even 10th pitch. For a few of these, this kind of business model still works as they will compensate the lost pitches financially through the well paid ones that they win, but these are usually composers who work exclusively in this line of work.

However, there are also other lines of work where pitches have become common. It's even not rare that composers pitch for feature films these days. Depending on how much work one invests into the pitch it can become financially really problematic if the project doesn't pay a pitch fee.

There are fortunately quite a few decent companies and clients in the industry who always pay a pitch fee which usually is not a massive amount of money but at least enough to compensate for the time that you invest into it. But unfortunately, there are also a lot that don't.

The general problem is of course that the competiton in the field is huge and there are a lot of composers who willingly jump on every unpaid pitch hoping to win it and really putting their heart and soul into this pitch which consequentially leads to clients believing that it is appropriate business behavior to ask for unpaid pitches.

Personally, I think that this whole issue is two-sided. I have done plenty of unpaid pitches in my earlier years but now usually don't accept unpaid pitches. I mentioned this in several occasions already but as soon as you give value to your own work, it will also make your clients start to value your work. This of course has lead to some occasions where I asked for a pitch budget and declined to participate when I learned that there was none. 

The problem is that you don't have much leverage in a pitch situation. If someone want's to hire you for a project but doesn't want to pay enough, you might have some leverage to negotiate a higher fee as they specifically chose you to work for them. If you ask for a pitch budget in a no-budget pitch, you simply are out as they didn't specifically wanted to work with you but picked you among other composers to provide an idea. So asking for a pitch budget in such an occasion will in almost all cases not lead to them suddenly agreeing to pay one. So you should be aware of these consequences when you decline to accept such a pitch. Worst case might be that they will never ask you again.

However, just doing the maths and agreeing to a non budget pitch where the odds of winning are super low anyway, it's not like you lose much but a slim chance of maybe earning some money.

On the other hand there are these occasions where an unpaid pitch comes along where the odds of winning are really good or the prospect of winning means a considerable push in career (or financially) where it might be worth going down that path. In some occasions being asked to pitch for a certain project already is such a high privilege that it would be stupid to not participate. I had some of these occasions in my professional career, even quite recently where without a doubt I agreed to pitch for no money.

So personally, I think it is not the best choice to put a strict "I'm never doing unpaid pitches" policy into place as the industry and circumstances might just be too diverse to make a general decision about pitches in every case.

But also, the common practice of not paying for pitches that really take a lot of work is a big problem in the industry and depending on what level of your career you need to be really careful to not being exploited into a constant loop of such pitches.