Get Paid What You’re Worth!

If you’re a musician gigging in bars, cafes, and anywhere else, you’re worth a hell of lot. Some quick figuring might help when negotiating for shows.

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Being as musical as a bucket of oatmeal, I am spared the agony of being a performing musician anywhere and have never had to bargain with venue operators for a show. But I did have to sell ads to such as they did for nearly 30 years and learned the hard way what promotions are to promoters, business owners and others who need every advantage to stay in business. That not only includes advertising, but music—provided by musicians like you—for far too little money offered by business owners who, on the whole, are happy to steal you blind in search of profits and the warm glow of feeling like they took you for a sucker. Happens all the time, unfortunately, and it’s wrong.

It’s wrong to offer six talented musicians a paltry $700 for a three-hour gig on New Year’s Eve at some hot joint; it’s wrong to make musicians pay for the food they eat in some places on the nights they’re playing in, or pretend to be, some generous grand seigneur willing to give you half off the price of chicken wings. Maybe the nadir of cheap was a long-ago coffeehouse owner who told me with a straight face that he felt entitled to half the tip jar the folky trio in his place labored for on weekends; the musicians that packed the cafe to overflowing when they played and helped establish that cafe as a place where people felt welcome and happy—and spent money.

“Spent money” awareness is the key to getting enough of it. So is sizing up the venue and measuring what music helps a venue make on a night when the place is packed, and people are in tune with the tunes and tune masters. But before we do that, we should first size up your costs to do business, and what you need to cover even before you walk in the door.

Your instruments are costly—and need insurance (you do have insurance, don’t you?). Your sound equipment doesn’t grow on trees, either, and everything you shuffle into the show place needs to be insured for its “replacement value,” the cost of new items, periodically adjusted for inflation. That has to be considered when dealing with the venue. So does your fuel for flying down freeways at five bucks a gallon. How many hours a day do you practice so as to be in top form when you’re on stage? That time costs you money, since you could have been doing something else that makes you money instead, and that needs factoring in the cost of your art. In short, you really need to assess what it’s costing you to help that venue get rich off your labor—and not blink when you ask for all that and the profit margin your talent needs to flourish.

The old bandsmen I used to know as a kid used to say that the job was the job, and every job was entitled to a certain level of craft and execution by musicians who thought of themselves as skilled craftsmen. Skilled craft labor ain’t cheap; just ask for an hourly quote from a skilled finish carpenter, brick layer, machinist, or anyone else whose life has been spent in perfecting skills that show in first-class work that lasts for ages. Musicians are (very) skilled labor, no different in the skill levels as any other fine craftsman, and their compensation ought to be regarded accordingly.

Bob Weir, restaurant critic extraordinaire, chef, and celebrated professor in food service studies, used to take me to lunch at various restaurants when he wrote for my newspaper [The Espresso] years ago and would dissect places from the moment we walked in. He could tell if a place was short staffed by the lay of the tables; if the chef was an alcoholic by the taste of the hors d’oeurves; whether the management was competent, lax, or absent by any number of tiny details only one in the trade would notice. But he also could detect how much money a place was earning by a quick glance at the menu and spending perhaps a half hour to an hour in a restaurant, club, or cafe. The way he did that was to tote the number of seats at the tables, how many were occupied and plug in a rough average of how much each patron might spend in the joint in an hour. In those days, he often figured an average of 20 dollars per person per hour at every table. He also kept an eye on the bar and did the same sort of rough calculation. There’s a lot of money to be made in alcohol sales, and in a club or music venue, the bar is where the profits are. And profits soar when the music is good.

So, as a general rule of calculating what you might be worth to a club or other venue, I suggest you visit a place you fancy to play in on some busy night as a guest to see the show—and keep an eye on their business volume and do the math. Don’t be surprised if you figure several thousand dollars per hour, changing hands from patrons to the house; it happens. That’s business; that’s why they’re in business and profit is the reason for business and that’s okay. But if the musicians are very likely a cause of why that several grand flows into the till, that understanding becomes a bargaining chip in your favor.

That form of quickie calculation is what the “copyright protectors,” such as ASCAP and BMI do when they assess a business for playing copyrighted music without a license or special dispensation or whatever it is they offer. I well recall even small coffeehouses in San Diego getting dunned for $20K, suddenly, for only one wrong song. Maybe you won’t be able to ask for that much (or maybe you should) but those kinds of numbers show that music ain’t chicken feed. Budget and calculate accordingly.

Finally, figure the costs of your own self promotion. It takes time to gin up a site, a podcast, reels, spread posters, and record music in a studio and deal with distribution. The time spend on those things ought to reflect the costs of skilled labor and the money needed to float not only your current standard of living but the standards you want to reach, soon. Never sell yourself short and when the corporate locusts threaten, remind them that music is the source of the black ink their bottom line flows up from. Good luck.