Hello friend!

My name is — actually, I don’t have a name. But I am a friend. And I know one thing — that licensing and usage fees are crucial to the health and longevity of the creative industries.

Now I know that’s not as rock ‘n’ roll as you might have hoped. But for creative professionals like yourself, it’s LIFE AND DEATH. There — that’s a bit better, isn’t it?

Fun and games aside, licensing and usage might not seem so hardcore on the surface, but it can mean the life and death of your creative career. And to me, that’s just as important.

The reason you have been sent this link is because someone wanted to give you the heads up about the Use It Or Lose it campaign — a grassroots advocacy group for creative professionals like ourselves, which seeks to enable positive, educational, and mutually beneficial conversations around the subject of usage fees and licensing. Sexy, right?

In case you haven’t noticed, there are bloody screens everywhere. With all those screens comes a huge need for visual content to put on them — and on other things of course — which has created a huge pool of incredible creatives (like yourself) to make said content. Whilst licensing has traditionally been the realm of illustrators and photographers, we’re encouraging everyone in the growing global creative community to put their heads together and figure out the best way forward.

Creatives across the globe are forging their own unique educational and vocational pathways, entering into the freelance marketplace quicker than ever. What we often forget to acknowledge in the process, is that each of these freelancers is essentially starting up their own small business practice. As a result, the foundations of these businesses are often built on pricing models that might help them to get just above water, but will not prove sustainable for the long term.

The companies that commission freelance creatives take advantage of that trend. They know we are hungry for work, that we are trying to make a name for ourselves and stake our claim in the workforce. That’s not to say their intentions are bad — but they are certainly dealing with their own challenges and the pressure to produce more work, better work, faster work, for less and less money each year. It’s the free market in action. Yay!

Here’s the thing — most of us are selling ourselves short. We’re undervaluing the service we provide and giving away our most valuable resources and assets for fractions of cents on the dollar, mostly out of fear. Fear that they’ll say no. That we won’t get another job. That we don’t know what we’re doing. That they’ll see right through us. That someone else will undercut us.

The thing about fear though, is that it’s very often a result of ignorance or misinformation, so we’re taking one small step towards straightening that out.

The first thing to wrap your head around is that the creative industries are a delicately honed ecosystem that is currently in a state of flux. We need awesome projects to grow and sustain our practices. Our clients need creative people like us to give form to their amazing ideas so they can increase business for their clients and themselves. To keep this delicate system balanced, we need a fair model of remuneration that will sustain and support this mutual dependence.

The team behind Use It Or Lose It — and its supporters — have spent many years working within the creative industries and we’re all deeply concerned about what we are seeing. This campaign is a carefully researched and considered attempt to explain the benefits of licensing to those on all sides of a creative agreement. It will hopefully be one drop in the bucket of a general course correction that needs to happen imminently if we all want to keep doing what we’re doing.

To continue on the current path means a financial race to the bottom. A stagnant monoculture of clients and creatives. It means less creatives and studios that can earn meaningful full-time wages. More part-time hobbyists, or people dropping out of the game completely. With less talent available, creative work becomes stale as creatives are stretched thin, without the human resources they need to do their jobs. And then we all walk a barren Mad Max-style wasteland, devoid of any art or music or anything. Alright, that might be an exaggeration. But who knows? Again, fear is a great motivator here.

Are you still with me? I promise these aren’t the rantings of a madman. Usage and licensing are complex and subtle concepts that every creative needs to consider in relation to their own practice. The notion of value-based pricing is nothing new, but it takes a strong mind to figure out how to fit it into your own business.

Chances are, the people behind Use It Or Lose It have had this conversation many more times than you or I. And while every individual and commission is by its very nature bespoke, there are some common questions that everyone comes across at some point or another. We’ve outlined our answers to these below, so that you can hopefully move forward with some greater understanding of why this is so important and how to make it work for you.