At the beginning of the month we asked our audience of professional mixers how often they were asked for immersive mixes and how they charged for them. We have the results and they make for interesting reading.

What we wanted to find out is whether Immersive mixes are a case of client demand driving change in the industry or whether it’s less straightforward than that. To find out what is happening we asked the following questions:

• First we asked whether respondents mixed music projects, post production projects or both. This allowed us to separate out the results for the following question in to these three categories.

• Next we asked what proportion of enquiries were for immersive mixes. This was specifically asking about client demand. It might well be that projects get mixed in an immersive format but unless that was a result of an initial enquiry requesting an immersive mix it would fall outside the scope of this question. We were’t asking how many immersive mixes you do, we were asking how many immersive mixes your clients request, which might not be the same thing depending on the clients you receive enquiries from.

• Lastly we asked respondents to approximate how much extra, if anything, they charged for additional work incurred in creating immersive mixes.

There were over 750 respondents who completed the survey. We asked that only mixers who mix professionally complete it. Here’s how the numbers look.

As would be expected, more respondents were mixing music than post. This is in line with our data about the Production Expert audience. Given the relative sizes of these two groups overall this shows a strong representation of post production users.

The music-only group showed a strong non-immersive client base. There are clearly specialist immersive mixers out there and given the uptake of Dolby Atmos and Apple Spatial in the music streaming space it is clear that there is interest from clients in immersive mixes but the non-immersive work, which in music we can safely assume to be stereo, is clearly in the majority at this time.

The post-only respondents show significantly more immersive mixes being requested but the fact that over 50% of responses were for non-immersive was, for me, the biggest surprise of this survey. And with under 20% of the total enquires reporting the majority of their enquiries being for immersive mixes, it shows that there is still plenty of 5.1 and stereo work being done out there.

There is a striking similarity between the ‘both’ category and the post category. This group was included as there will always be respondents who can’t place themselves exclusively in either music or post, but because this group covers so much, it’s more of a challenge to draw specific conclusions from this data beyond that already illustrated by the music and post results.

How Do you Charge?

This brings us to the final question. How do people factor in the additional work of an immersive mix?

The data suggests that there is no clear pricing trend, some don’t charge extra, either because they are absorbing the extra time or because they are already charging for it in their standard rate. Others are adding a surcharge of between 20-60%, with a few even doubling their fee.

This is the first time we have run a survey like this and the data forms a baseline against which we can assess future results when we run a survey like this again. I look forward to those results as they will form the beginning of a historical trend. One good point which was raised is that our questions framed immersive mixes as an add on, whereas some mixers would see a stereo or 5.1 downmix as just another deliverable from an immersive mix. This is an excellent point and one we’ll include in the future.

What do you think? Do these results surprise you or confirm your expectations?