Holiday ad voiceover and music bed: cost per spot, 300-900 chars

A 600-character voiceover costs $0.0285 on Sume and a music track costs $0.125 flat, so the audio for one holiday spot is $0.1535. That is under 15 cents, which makes audio the smallest line of an ad budget.

Text-to-speech is priced per 1,000 characters at $0.0475 in the public catalog, and music is a flat price per track, as listed in the music docs.

The arithmetic

Voiceover: characters / 1,000 x $0.0475, rounded up in micros. Music: $0.125 per track, whatever its length. Total: the two added.

How long is 600 characters

A short retail script is often about 100 words, which is around 600 characters. Count your own copy, since the price follows characters, including spaces and punctuation.

Write the price and date in the script once. Say it as plain digits that you check by ear before you publish.

At campaign scale

For 50 spots with a unique 600-character voiceover each and one shared music track, the audio is 50 x $0.0285 + $0.125 = $1.55. With a new track per spot it is 50 x $0.1535 = $7.675.

Reusing one bed across a family of spots keeps the line at 12.5 cents total, and it keeps the sound consistent across a campaign.

Before you ship

• Check licensing and disclosure rules for generated audio on each platform.
• Pair the voiceover with a transcript so captions match the audio. A transcript is $0.01 per audio minute.
• See the credits docs for how holds settle.