How to price a recording studio by the hour
· 4 min read
Most rooms are priced by looking at what the studio down the road charges. Here's a better way to arrive at a number you can defend.
The usual method for pricing a studio is to find out what the room down the road charges and sit slightly under it. It's understandable and it's a bad idea, because you end up in a race with someone whose costs you don't know, competing on the one attribute you can't win on forever.
Here's a more useful way to get to a number.
Start with what you need the room to earn
Not what it could earn on a good month — what it has to cover.
Add up the fixed monthly cost of the room: rent or the share of your mortgage, power, insurance, internet, any finance on equipment, and a realistic figure for maintenance. Call that your floor.
Now be honest about occupancy. Not the ceiling; the number you'd actually bet on. For a room being rented out part-time alongside your own work, somewhere between 20 and 50 hours a month is a realistic starting expectation, and the lower end is more likely at first.
Floor divided by realistic hours gives you a break-even rate. That's not your price. It's the number below which you're subsidising other people's records, which is worth knowing before you set anything.
Then price the thing that's actually scarce
The break-even calculation tells you what you need. It says nothing about what the room is worth, which is a different question: what can someone do here that they can't easily do elsewhere?
Things that genuinely command a premium:
- A room with real acoustic character. A live room that sounds like something is expensive to build and impossible to fake. If you have one, it's your headline, not a footnote.
- Gear that isn't everywhere. A well-maintained piano. A particular desk or tape machine. Vintage synths people actually want on records.
- An engineer who knows the room. If you're in the room, you're not renting square footage, you're selling a result. That's a materially different product and should be priced as one.
- Isolation and hours. A room where a band can be loud at 11pm is worth more than one where they can't, and it's worth saying so.
Things that don't command a premium, however much they cost you: a nice sofa, a good coffee machine, recent redecoration. They help someone choose you over an equivalent room. They don't move the rate.
Where most people get it wrong
Pricing the engineer into the room rate without saying so. If your rate includes you, a guest comparing you to a dry-hire room three suburbs away is comparing two unlike things and will conclude you're expensive. Price the room, price the engineer, and let people see both. On SESH that's a separate engineer option on the listing rather than a number buried in your headline rate.
One rate for everything. A four-hour tracking session and a one-hour vocal overdub aren't the same product. Blocks price better for the former; hourly for the latter.
Refusing to discount the hours nobody wants. Saturday afternoon and Tuesday morning are not the same commodity. Charging the same for both means Saturday is underpriced and Tuesday stays empty. Discounting your dead hours isn't devaluing the room — it's selling something that was otherwise going to be worth nothing.
Forgetting the fee is on top, not out of. On SESH the guest pays a 12% service fee above your rate; your 5% comes out of your side. So a $100 hour means the guest sees $112 and you receive $95. Set your rate as the number you want to receive plus that 5%, not as the number you want the guest to see.
The cheapest room rarely wins
This is the part that surprises people. When someone is choosing where to record, price is a filter, not a decision. They set a rough budget, discard everything above it, and then choose on everything else: does the room suit the song, is the gear right, do the reviews suggest the day will go smoothly.
Being the cheapest option in a city mostly attracts people whose priority is being cheap, and those bookings are — reliably — the ones that run over, haggle, and leave the room in a state.
Being clearly worth it attracts people who care about the record. Those are better sessions, and they're the ones that come back.
A reasonable place to start
If you genuinely have no idea:
- Work out your break-even rate.
- Look at three comparable rooms nearby — comparable meaning similar size, similar gear, similar hours.
- Price at or slightly above the middle of those, not below.
- Publish a discounted weekday-daytime rate.
- Leave it three months before changing anything.
Then look at what actually happened. If you're turning work away, you're too cheap. If you're getting enquiries that don't convert, the problem is usually the listing, not the price. If you're getting no enquiries at all, it's discovery — nobody's found you yet.
List your room and set the rate you can defend. You can change it whenever you like.