There’s a degree of mystery around the nuts and bolts of how creatives earn a living. Since a general audience rarely has a chance to peer behind the curtain of the cultural economy, we’re going to break it down.
With many jobs you get a paycheck that is the same week to week, or is tied to the number of hours you work in a given period. As a musician, income is usually made of many smaller pieces. Every musician has their own patchwork of gigs and sometimes other income as well, and figuring out the ideal patchwork is part of each musician’s job as they craft their career path. MaCCNO works towards helping strengthen and stabilize the parts of the cultural economy which are inconsistent, shaky, or weak, and understanding the realities of musicians’ lives is the first step in this process.
Why is it that musicians’ livelihoods are a black hole of standard data? It’s because musician income doesn’t follow the structures and patterns of normal economic data-gathering and tools, so it’s harder to document. Musicians generally make money from multiple gigs every week, including weekly, repeated gigs or one-off gigs, private party and bar gigs, hotel gigs and parade gigs, dinner gigs and wedding gigs, etc. There is no standard rate of pay across gigs, and no standard rules for how gig contracts need to be structured. Every booker, venue, etc. has their own process. (See Sidebar)
The wide variety means that every musician has their own metric for deciding whether or not to accept a gig. Balancing money against musical fulfillment and/or social enjoyment is a common three-part metric, but there are infinite variations. Every working musician has occasionally calculated that the money offered for a particularly boring or unpleasant gig makes it worth taking, or that a particularly low-paying gig is fulfilling for reasons beyond money, such as loving the music, having fun, or playing with a musician they want to build a relationship with. Many musicians will have gigs in the same weekend with pay ranging widely between hundreds of dollars, and income can vary month to month by several thousand because of the seasonality in the New Orleans year (like the hot/slow season vs. festival season). When we surveyed musicians as a part of our microgrant program in 2021, one recipient answered that his monthly income was “$485 to $4,000.”
Musicians primarily make money from two sources: the venue (a guarantee or a percentage of the bar), and the audience (cover charge or ticket price, tips, merchandise sales). But this can be divided up differently depending on the circumstances. There is no set way gigs are structured; each one may be different.
Some examples: A musician or band might be paid with a check for a pre-set amount from the venue, or with a payout from unpredictable ticket sales or a percentage of the bar sales, and it may or may not be supplemented with cash tips. This means that a musician might get their cut of tips the night of the gig, followed by a digital or cash payout from their bandleader a day or two later. Musicians might, if the payout is all cash, divide up the money right after the gig, or they might get an electronic payment before the gig if there was a guarantee or a deposit paid. There might be a guarantee on a weekly gig, but the tips could vary from $10 per person to $100 per person week to week, which changes the total take-home by a lot. A musician might play a wedding gig with a guaranteed rate of pay, or a bar gig where the payout is entirely dependent on the amount of drinks sold, with no minimum floor. Or they might play a venue gig where the pay is based on ticket sales, but there is a guaranteed minimum payout.
To emphasize the complexity of this data collection, the gigs reported can range from one to four hours, with no obvious correlation between length of time and take-home pay (a one-hour wedding ceremony can pay three times more than a four-hour bar gig). Additionally, the amount of the take-home pay represented by tips varies from $0 to well over $100 per person, which means that the breakdown of each gig can be unique.
It’s also important to remember that musicians can have various costs associated with their gigs as well, and these can get overlooked when thinking about the economics of gig life. Individual costs can include travel and food (sometimes but certainly not always covered by the venue or booker) as well as structural costs, for example when the venue pays the door person or sound person out of the money collected at the door. For some musicians, a “day job” or non-music jobs can contribute to their total income, with music education representing a distinct third category outside of gigging or day jobs. All of these factors further complicate the topic of how musicians make money.
To support musicians in New Orleans, we need to start by understanding the realities of musician life. Continuing to understand the nuances of how musicians get paid, and to work on each piece of it will lead to a stronger cultural economy with a pay floor and less variability and uncertainty for the musicians who are so crucial to our city’s identity and economy.
Variation in Reported Total Take-Home Income From a Survey of 127 Musicians Conducted by MaCCNO (2021)
Overview of the Ways Musicians Can Get Paid
- Cover charge—Money collected at the door, per audience member. Can be adjusted by the door person if they want to discount it later in the evening, or allow other discounts.
- Ticket price—Pre-set price, can generate sales ahead of time or be tied to a minimum guaranteed fee.
- Bar split/percentage—An amount of money tied to how much alcohol the venue sells. This is an extremely common but problematic practice, and it means that musicians can theoretically make little or no money if there’s a slow night at the venue.
- Tips—Extremely common element of gigs, but is problematically tied to musicians having to convince listeners that their music is worth paying for. But in New Orleans it frequently generates half or more of musicians’ take-home pay.
- Merch sales—This is not always part of musicians’ pay. It may go into a band fund for future expenses, or solely to the bandleader if they fronted the money for it.
- Guarantees—A contracted agreement where the price paid to the band or musician is agreed upon ahead of time, and is not impacted by variations in attendance or ticket sales.
- Non-monetary benefits—While not a valid replacement for monetary compensation, some gigs can provide additional benefits to musicians in the form of making connections, meeting people who can generate future gigs, or meeting other musicians, etc.
This space is provided to MaCCNO as a community service and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or editorial policies of ANTIGRAVITY.
