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Welcome to the most unreasonable gig on Upwork.
A few years ago, I went through a lengthy phase of underemployment, and I’d occasionally trawl Upwork for music production posts.
The main problem with music gigs on Upwork is that posters often don’t have a firm grasp on the nuts-and-bolts of music production — or are so accustomed to using cheap-or-free stock music that paying anything for music feels like a luxury. As a result, the rates are usually rather low: It’s pretty typical to see gigs in the $5 / hour range if you do the math.
My friend Bob is currently on the job-hunting grind, and dropped this post in the group chat yesterday — We Want Music Tracks — which takes this tendency to a new, ascendant tier of lunacy. There’s some language issues with the post, but that’s fine — I’m not going to pick on people who might not be native English speakers. Anyway, here’s the gig in a nutshell:
- 200 Tracks total.
- The tracks should be 3:00–5:30 depending on genre.
- Use of royalty-free sample packs is OK.
- Deliverables: 44.1k/32-bit wav, with “original” and “radio” versions of each track.
- Timeline: 50 tracks delivered every 5–7 days.
- Pay: $1.30 per track, $260 total.
Here’s a few different ways to think about this
If you worked this like a standard 5-day, 8-hour workweek, you’d need to make 10 tracks per day, giving you 48 minutes to produce each track.
At the end of the week, you’d transfer your 50 tracks, and get $65. You do this for a full month. The breakdown is $1.65 / hour.
Let’s say you get ambitious and doubled your production rate, making one track every 24 minutes, and only working 4 hours a day. You’re now making $3.30 / hour.
But let’s say instead you want to “make it worth your while” by producing the tracks quickly enough to make minimum wage ($15.50 here in CA).
Good News / Bad News! You’ll finish all 200 tracks in a a little over 2 standard workdays… but you have to produce 12 tracks per hour. That’s one track every 5 minutes.
