We tried to find out what this industry charges. Almost nobody will say.

This publication exists because of a gap we can demonstrate rather than assert.

Over the past week we went through the published pricing of music PR agencies, submission platforms, distributors, awarding bodies and funders, looking for figures stated by the organisation that charges them. The results split cleanly into two groups, and the split is instructive.

Who publishes

Anyone competing for your money up front. Distributors publish annual prices to the cent. Submission platforms publish per-credit costs. Awarding bodies publish entry fees per category. Grant funders publish amounts, eligibility and deadlines. All of these are readable in a browser in under a minute, and all of them are in our reference section.

Who does not

Anyone selling a service to you. We could find exactly one music PR agency that publishes a rate on its own site: Cyber PR, whose campaigns page states that single campaigns start at $1,000. That is it. One.

The ranges that circulate everywhere else, $1,500 to $5,000 a month, $3,000 to $8,000 a campaign, come from third-party listicles and SEO pages, not from agencies. We are not printing them, because a number without a source is not information.

The detail that makes this worth an article rather than a complaint: at least one agency markets itself specifically on "pricing transparency" and publishes no prices at all, only a pay-per-placement model and a contact form.

Why this matters more than it sounds

When only one side of a negotiation knows the going rate, the other side is guessing. A director quoting for their first paid music video, a colourist setting a day rate, a producer building a budget, all of them are working from rumour and from whatever they were paid last time, which was itself set the same way.

Published rate cards exist in unionised film and television, and they are genuinely useful. Almost nobody reading this works under one. Commercials, music videos and branded content, which is where most of this trade actually happens, are negotiated privately by people who have been told the numbers are confidential.

What we are going to do about it

Two things. We will keep publishing every figure we can verify, with its source and the date we read it, and we will say plainly when a category of information does not exist rather than filling the space.

And we are collecting rates from readers. Role, day rate, city, year. We publish ranges and medians, never a single identifiable figure, never your name and never your client. That is on the submit page, and it is the only way this particular gap ever closes.