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The session fee pays for the recording. The usage fee, also called a licensing fee, pays for the right to run it. A buyout is a usage fee paid once for a stated set of media, territory and term. Always ask which rights a buyout covers.
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On this page: usage rights · session fee vs usage fee · terms · buyouts · perpetuity · renewals · exclusivity · market and territory · streaming and paid social · the questions to ask
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 voice over usage rights are
Usage rights are the permission a client buys to run your recording. They say where it plays, where in the world, for how long, and whether you may voice a competitor meanwhile. US contracts spell the word license; the meaning is the same.
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.
Session fee vs usage fee
The session fee pays for the work of recording. The usage fee pays for the right to run the result.
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. Union and non-union voiceover work explains why a union term rounds up to whole cycles.
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 is in voice over
In voice over, a buyout is a single usage fee paid once instead of in cycles or at each renewal. The word does not say what the fee covers. The media, territory and term written next to it do.
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 means in voice over
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.
When the term ends: renewals
A renewal is a new payment for a further term of use on a recording the client already has. The session is over and the audio exists. What the client is buying is more time.
When the term you wrote into the quote runs out, the client has three choices. They stop running the work, they renew it, or they keep running it without asking. The third is more common than it should be, and it is the reason the end date belongs in writing. A quote with a start date and a length gives you a day on which the client owes you an answer.
Price a renewal as usage. There is no new session unless the script changes, so the renewal quote carries the usage line from the original, set against the new term and the media and territory the client wants now. Ask whether any of those have changed. A campaign that began on one channel in one country often comes back wanting more of both, and that is a larger licence, not a renewal of the old one.
Continuity has a value to the client that a new voice cannot offer. The audience already knows the sound of the campaign. That is a good reason for both sides to agree a renewal promptly. It is never a reason to let the work run past the date while the paperwork catches up.
Keep a list of every licence you have granted and the day it ends. A short note to the client a few weeks before that day is ordinary business, not pestering. It gives them time to budget, and it gives you the renewal rather than a discovery months later that the spot never came down.
If you find your work still running after the term, write to the client. Name the recording and the date the term ended, and ask how they would like to regularise the use. Most clients pay once they are asked. Mark the job as a renewal in the calculator and it is priced as a renewal rather than as a new booking.
Exclusivity: a separate fee for a separate promise
Exclusivity is a promise that you will not voice a competing brand for an agreed period. Usage pays for what the client does with your recording. Exclusivity pays for what you agree not to do with your voice. They are two different things, and they belong on two different lines.
The cost of exclusivity falls on work you have not been offered yet. That is why it is easy to give away. Nobody feels the loss on the day the quote is signed. You feel it months later, when a competitor's agency calls and you have to say no.
Three things set the size of the promise. The first is the category. A promise not to voice any car brand is far larger than a promise not to voice one rival model. The second is the length, which should be written as dates, not as the life of the campaign. The third is the territory. A promise that covers one country leaves you free elsewhere, and a worldwide promise does not.
Some categories weigh more than others, because they are where the regular work is. Cars, insurance, banking, phone networks and fast food are booked often, and booked by competitors. Agreeing to stay out of one of those is a real loss of income. Agreeing to stay out of a small, rarely advertised category costs you little. Price the promise by what it takes away.
Write the category narrowly and in plain words. "Competing products" is not a category, because someone will decide later what it meant, and it will not be you. Name the product type, put an end date on it, and say whether it covers all media or only the media in the licence.
If a client asks for exclusivity after the quote is agreed, it is a new request with a new price, not a detail. The same applies at renewal. The promise ends with the term unless both sides agree to extend it, and an extension is paid. Keep your own list of every exclusivity you hold and its end date, so you can answer in one line when an agent checks for a conflict.
Market and territory: local, regional, national and worldwide
Market and territory are two separate measures of reach. Market is how large the audience is inside one country. Territory is how many countries the licence covers. A quote needs both, and clients often give you only one.
Market is counted, not described. Each city or broadcast area the spot runs in adds to the total, and the total decides the size of the buy. The calculator reads it off six steps, from a single market at the bottom to national at the top. A client who says the job is local and then lists a dozen cities has described a regional or national buy. Add the markets up before you accept the word local.
Ask for the market list by name. A list of cities can be checked. A phrase like "a few regions" cannot. If the list is long enough, the job is national, and it is simpler for both of you to price it that way.
Territory starts where market stops. A national buy in the United States, the same buy across the United States and Canada, one other country, a group of countries, and the whole world are five different licences. Each step adds an audience the client can reach with the same recording, so each step is priced as its own line.
Worldwide deserves care. Online work can be seen almost anywhere, so clients sometimes ask for worldwide rights by habit. Ask where the audience actually is. A brand that sells in one country and posts a video that can be viewed abroad is not running a worldwide campaign. A brand that places paid media in several countries is.
Narration, e-learning and other work priced by the job do not carry a territory line, because nobody is buying an audience. If one of those projects turns into advertising, it gains a market and a territory, and the quote changes with it. Write both measures into the quote, and say that use outside them needs a new agreement.
Streaming, OTT and paid social usage
Streaming and social placements are where much new usage now sits, and they are where the words overlap most. Three of them nest inside one another.
OTT, short for over the top, is video delivered over the internet instead of by a broadcast signal. Connected TV is the same streaming video watched on a television set. Online pre-roll is the advert that plays before a video on a website or in an app. Paid social is advertising the client pays to place in social media feeds.
The calculator treats these rights as nested. OTT and CTV include pre-roll. Pre-roll includes paid social. When a client buys more than one of them, the quote bills the largest right once and says so in the notes. Billing all three separately looks like padding to a buyer who knows their own media plan, and the trust it costs is worth more than the extra line.
The nesting works in one direction only. A client who buys paid social has not bought pre-roll, and a client who buys pre-roll has not bought OTT. If the brief grows after the quote, the licence grows with it.
Organic posting is a separate question. A video on the client's own channel, with no money behind it, reaches their followers and few others. Once the client pays to promote the same video, it reaches people who never chose to see it, and it becomes advertising. Ask whether anything will be boosted. Clients often forget to mention it, and it is the most common way a small web job turns into a paid campaign.
Streaming also blurs the line with broadcast. A broadcast licence does not automatically include OTT, and an OTT licence does not include broadcast. Name each medium in the quote. For podcast, game and YouTube work, see how each type of job is priced.
Six 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.
- Will any of it run as paid social or pre-roll, and on which platforms?
- Where in the world will it run?
- Which cities or regions, by name?
- How long is the term, and when does it start?
- Am I restricted from voicing others in this category, and for how long?
Six 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 voiceover rate 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.
For a layout you can copy, read how to quote a voice over job. If a client wants to know what the whole job should cost before the scope is settled, how much a voice over costs walks a brief through to a number.
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.