Most of the money in voiceover is not paid for the recording; it is paid for permission to use it. A client books you for a session, then runs the audio for two years, in four countries, on television and online. The hour in the booth is a small part of what they are buying, and the permission to keep running it is the rest. Price the session, hand over the permission for nothing, and you have sold the wrong thing.
This page is about that permission: what it is, what the words mean, and how to pin a client down before you send a number.
What a usage licence actually is
A usage licence is a set of limits. You grant a client the right to use your recording in named places, in named media, for a named length of time, and everything outside those limits stays yours. That is the whole idea.
Four limits do most of the work. Media is where the audio plays: online video, broadcast television, radio, cinema, in-store, a phone system, a training module. Territory is where it plays, whether that is one city, one country, a region or the world. Term is how long it may play. Exclusivity is whether you are barred from voicing a competitor while their campaign is running.
Change any one of those and you have changed the product. A regional radio spot for six months and a worldwide broadcast campaign for three years are not the same job at a different price. They are different licences that happen to need the same hour in the booth.
The session fee and the usage fee
A quote for commercial work usually has two parts, and it helps to keep them visibly separate.
The session fee pays for your time, your voice, your room, your direction and your edit. It is the labour. It barely moves whether the spot runs in one town or across a country.
The usage fee pays for the value the client gets from running it. It scales with reach and with time, because reach and time are what the client is actually buying.
Merge the two into one number and you lose the argument before it starts. A client who sees a single figure will push on the whole figure. A client who sees two lines can be told, plainly, that the session fee is fixed and the usage fee moves with what they want to do. Separate lines also make renewal simple. When the term runs out you are not requoting the job; you are requoting one line.
Cycles, flights and terms
Three words describe the same thing. All of them are about time, and buyers use all three loosely.
A cycle is a fixed billing period, the shape used in union scale agreements. It is a defined block of time after which the use must be renewed or must stop. Cycles exist so that a long campaign pays repeatedly rather than once.
A flight is a burst of activity inside a longer window. A client might license twelve months of use and only air the spot in two flights of six weeks. Some clients will argue they should pay for the flights and not the window. Price the window, because for the whole of it they hold the right to run the audio and you cannot sell that right to anyone else.
A term is the outer boundary. It is the date on which the client must take the audio down or come back to you. A term without a start date is not a term. Write the start, write the length, and write what happens at the end.
What a buyout means
Buyout has no fixed meaning. That is exactly the problem with it.
To one client it means a full licence with no time limit and no territory limit, everything, forever. To another it means one year, one country, online only, with no renewal paperwork. Some producers use it to mean that you have been paid already and should stop asking. The word travels between markets and collects a new meaning in each one.
When a client says buyout they have told you almost nothing, and what you fill in from your own experience will not match what they filled in from theirs. So ask what it covers, in what media, in what territory, and for how long, then write the answer into the quote before you price it. If they cannot define it, it is not a term of business. It is a hope that you will not ask.
What in perpetuity really costs you
In perpetuity means forever. No end date, no renewal, no second payment, and no future in which that audio stops working for them.
The cost is not only the fee you never get to charge again. It is the work you can no longer sell. If your voice runs for one brand forever, every competitor in that category gets harder to book, and the client has no reason to call you about that spot again. You are paid once, and the repeat work that would normally follow never arrives.
Perpetuity is not automatically wrong. Some material genuinely needs it: an on-hold system, a museum installation, a device that ships for years. What is wrong is granting it by accident, because the phrase sat in a paragraph and nobody defined it. A perpetual licence removes every future fee you could have charged for that recording, so it should be priced against all of them.
Four questions that pin the usage down
Ask these before you quote, and ask them in writing.
- Where will it be used? Name every medium, including social cutdowns and internal versions.
- Where in the world will it run?
- How long is the term, and when does it start?
- Am I restricted from voicing others in this category, and for how long?
Four short questions, and they cost the client nothing to answer. If the answers come back complete you can quote in minutes, because everything that moves the fee is now written down. Put them through the calculator and the number has a structure behind it.
When the client will not answer
Some clients cannot answer. A junior producer often does not know yet, and that is fair. Others will not answer, because vagueness is cheaper for them.
Either way, do not guess upward and do not guess downward. Quote the smallest defensible use and write that limit into the quote. Say what you have priced, and say plainly that wider use is available and costs more. That turns silence into a conversation instead of a licence.
Do not send a quote that grants broad use without defining it. A line reading "all media, worldwide, in perpetuity" sitting in a purchase order is a complete licence, and if you approve it you have agreed to every one of those terms without discussing any of them.
What to write in the quote
Your quote is the licence until a contract replaces it, so write it as one.
Put the session fee on its own line. Put the usage on its own line, with media, territory, term and exclusivity spelled out. Add one sentence saying that use outside those limits needs a new agreement, and one saying how long the quote stands. Nothing else is required. Short is fine; specific is the point.
Then keep the file. In two years somebody will ask whether they can carry on running it, and the person who can answer with a date and a scope is the person who gets paid again.
If a brief uses language you do not recognise, the glossary covers the terms. For how the rest of the fee is built, read how voiceover rates work.