Bruce Broughton is a composer who is scoring for film, television, and live concerts in Hollywood and Los Angeles.

Bruce Broughton

Bruce Broughton – Composer fees massively slashed

From 1967 through 1977 I worked for CBS Television Music Operations. After that time, I was freelancing as a television composer so I'm well acquainted with the fees, which were stable during that period. CBS paid composers $2,000 for their services on a one hour television show. This was a fee; not a package deal. Other studios, like Universal, paid as much as $2,500 for an hour show. Some smaller independent producers paid $1,800. The deal was essentially similar everywhere.

Adjusting for inflation and using two different inflation guides on the web, $2,000 in 1970 is worth approximately $12,055.52 in today's dollars. Unfortunately composers are still often paid about the same DOLLAR amount as in the late '60's, $1,500-$2,000 per episode. To make it worse, that is no longer a fee: it's a package deal from which the composer must fund the production.

— Bruce Broughton


With a career spanning more than 40 years, Bruce Broughton is one of the most successful TV-composers worldwide. He has received 23 Emmy nominations and won a record 10 times, most recently for his score to the HBO movie Warm Springs. One of the most versatile composers working today, he writes in every medium, from theatrical releases and TV feature films to the concert stage and computer games. His first major film score, for the Lawrence Kasdan western Silverado brought him an Oscar nomination. His very next project, Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes, earned a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack album. Broughton has received numerous commissions from the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the National Symphony, and members of the San Francisco Symphony. He is a lecturer in music composition and orchestration at UCLA and has taught film composition at the University of Southern California. He is a former governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a board member of ASCAP and a past president of The Society of Composers and Lyricists. He lectures in music composition at UCLA and teaches film composition in the Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program at USC.

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