Double Bass How much do various gigs pay?

[Don Hergert]

Also, many musicians at the upper tiers are in MULTIPLE bands, as well as solo efforts. I often wonder how challenging it must be to coordinate commitments between - say - the members of Punch Brothers and Hawktail. Especially when bandmates live in various locations from each other.

I've mentioned in the past, I'm mostly known for banjo playing, and in all the long term bands that I've played with, banjo is what I've been playing. With the band my wife and I have been with for going on 20 years now, two of the three bassists who have played with us play in multiple bands (our current bassist and our previous bassist)...

One of them -- who has recently moved to Nashville area -- owns and runs a studio and does session work as well as playing with multiple bands; he's mostly known for his guitar and vocal work. At the time he was singing and playing bass with us he would often also be called to sit in with bands and pick-up groups for gigs and festivals. I think at the time he was only a regular band member with our band, but he did a lot more gigs with other folks than just with us. He has been a member of a number of traveling bands -- in the 1 to 2% that we've been talking about -- and shared lots of stories with us. It has some glamor and you can see a lot of places, but it's a very hard life...

Watching the faces come and go in traveling bands, I get the impression that that is because of stress more than money, seeming like being in one of these bands is really not sustainable for a permanent full time career for the majority of the folks who try it.

 

[JazznFunk]

Non-profits is a misnomer. Someone is getting paid. IRS allows 45% for management/operating expenses
.
(I meant 75%)

Which is exactly why we still get paid when we play for those entities.... as I specified in my original reply. Bands getting paid as part of a fundraising concert can be written off as an operating expense by the non-profit entity.... which is why people should get paid for playing them: "We are hired and paid by the charity organizers to be there, usually for a reasonably discounted rate as a compromise."

Nonprofits can have employees, provided they are paid according to IRS rules, so yes... 'someone is getting paid.' But the insinuation is that it is somehow a nefarious or negative thing that they are? Not sure I share that energy.

 

[turf3]

Which is exactly why we still get paid when we play for those entities.... as I specified in my original reply. Bands getting paid as part of a fundraising concert can be written off as an operating expense by the non-profit entity.... which is why people should get paid for playing them: "We are hired and paid by the charity organizers to be there, usually for a reasonably discounted rate as a compromise."

Nonprofits can have employees, provided they are paid according to IRS rules, so yes... 'someone is getting paid.' But the insinuation is that it is somehow a nefarious or negative thing that they are? Not sure I share that energy.

It always torques me off when people expect that a charity gig means the musicians go unpaid.

Is the janitor who cleans up the hall being paid? How about the people standing behind the catering tables? Is the electric company donating for free eight hours' worth of power? How about the water company? The company that owns the hall, are they knocking off a day's rent for the month?

You KNOW the answers to all of these is NO.

 

[Ben Noblit]

For a touring bluegrass-ish band:

House concerts can be idiosyncratic, so let's treat your house concert as it it was a hard ticket club show. There are lots of different ways to split this up, but a typical one is called a "backend split." This means that house expenses get covered first, and then revenue after that (the "net") gets split between the house and the artist. Usually 70-85% to the artist.

So your event had $1500 in gross sales, with 3 event staff. Let's say each got paid $100, and the house spent $100 on promotion (flyers, Meta ads, etc). And $75 for supper for 5 people. That's $1025 net. Using the best case scenario split, that's 871.25 to the artist.

A touring band will likely have a booking agent, who gets at least 10%. 784.25. If they have management, which they likely don't at this level, that's another 10-20%. a TM, which this band doesn't have, is another 2-300. Let's say $50 in gas, and they drove home after, so no hotel rooms. And let's say the band didn't spend anything on promotion. 734.25.

An upper-middle undercard band is likely a business, owned by one to all of the members. Each member is on a standard show rate, plus a per diem. Assuming your band is near the top of the undercard on bigger festivals, and occasionally headlining smaller ones, that's probably $150-250 per show, plus a $25 per diem. Taking the lower range, each musician got paid $175.

The band business lost $90.75 on that gig. Let's hope they've got a bunch of good festival gigs to make up the difference, and build a warchest for the yearly business expenses (bookkeeping, maintenance/insurance on the van, hosting fees, studio time, etc. etc. etc.).

 

[bassmanbrent]

For me it’s always about the gig triangle. My music making is all over the map stylistically and monetarily, but every gig has to have 2 things from the triangle to be worth doing. My triangle includes the following…
1. Good money
2. Good musicians/hang
3. Good music

 

[Steven Ayres]

Over the past couple of years I've been taking a different approach to this question, and so far it seems to be working.

After fifty years of working bands, wannabe bands, original bands, cover bands, wacko bands, sideman gigs, weddings, corporates, show gigs and pit gigs I've had it with the grind: begging stage time from people who don't know and don't care, merch, media, marketing, recordings, union leeches, bad leaders, inebriated and emotionally crippled players, inebriated and entitled punters, travel, road food, on and on, and above all grinding my teeth at how little most venues have been willing to pay and how little appetite my bandmates have had for doing something useful about it. So I decided to take on one more project in which I could make the music I want to make, with people I like and respect, who like and respect me, in a venue that respects us and treats us well, no marketing, no media, no merch, no travel, one rehearsal and one two-hour show a week, I'm home by 9:35 and my weekends are free.

To make and keep this gig I've chosen to give up one thing: the kind of money that I know we're earning. The club we work with is a new 50-seat room; it's nice, the people are sweet and know their business, the drinks are good, but it's never gonna support a thousand-buck band more than once a year (I have five pieces and I want to get to seven). I'm paying my guys $60 per man, and the tips are usually good for another 20-40 per man. (This is crap, but it's also a little more than average in my area, particularly given the short shows.) I've brought in players who like the regularity — we invest in learning the material and we sell it over and over — and appreciate that I'm pretty fierce about taking care of my guys first. We're important to the venue and we're part of a building scene on the block. We're honing our chops. We get a broad range of ages and types as audience, many of them regulars, and we have regular dance coaches and partner dancers that add interest to the show, doing it for their own love of it. My guys can and do take other gigs on the weekends, one reason I chose Thursdays for us. (The other reason is that our little town can get ugly with turistas on weekends in the season; I'm trying to revive the idea of Locals Night on Thursdays, which was a thing here in the '90s.)

So my approach is to make the gig I want and try not to mind the other stuff — an amateur approach, perhaps, but I'm making a lot more music with a lot less heartburn, and what's really more important? The music culture of 50 and 60 years ago is not coming back, and if we can find a few people who still appreciate what we do in the same space, I don't know that we can hope for a lot more.

I'll say this to the original poster, though: if it doesn't feel like enough, stand up for yourself, and if you can't get it, don't take the gig. Fewer unhappy musicians working their asses off for crap can only increase the pressure to pay everyone a little better.

 

[turf3]

Over the past couple of years I've been taking a different approach to this question, and so far it seems to be working....

So my approach is to make the gig I want and try not to mind the other stuff — an amateur approach, perhaps, but I'm making a lot more music with a lot less heartburn, and what's really more important? The music culture of 50 and 60 years ago is not coming back, and if we can find a few people who still appreciate what we do in the same space, I don't know that we can hope for a lot more.
...

On multiple occasions I have pointed out (and a lot of people don't like to hear this) that the period of roughly 1900-1980 when the United States could support a meaningful number of professional musicians making decent money from performance, was an historical anomaly. Several factors played into this: reliable long distance travel first by railway then by automobile and bus; widely distributed sheet music; widely distributed phonograph records, which however had short play times, relatively poor reproduction quality, and fairly high cost; widely distributed radio broadcasts, but again with short play time, unpredictable programming, and relatively poor reproduction quality; and most important of all, the explosion in social couples dancing in the US that started in the late 1800s and started petering out about 1980.

For 90+% of the past of human music, professional musicians were extremely rare and most music was made at home or in local settings for minimal or no fee.

If you plan to set your sights on being able to earn useful money playing music in a market that's shrinking at an ever accelerating rate, you're signing up to invest in buggy-whip manufacture next to the Ford Model T dealer. There will always be a small number of people who make decent money (note, I'm not even saying "earn a living", just "decent money that makes it worth it ON A MONEY BASIS to leave the house") performing music. I'm not saying there will be none. What I"m saying (and this is a point that some people have trouble understanding) is that the percentage of people who make decent money performing music FOR MONEY is going down, it's going to keep going down, it's going to asymptotically reach some very low value and hang around there, and barring some completely unforeseen total social change, the days of "get some guys together, make a band, work up some set lists, and go make money playing for dancers" ARE GONE.

Now for all of you who read this and immediately start itching to write your three counterexamples, or tell me that "you could do it if you just wanted to hard enough", or try to argue that there will still be some pros out there, it won't all disappear, please READ AGAIN what I've written.

So what does all this mean?

To me, it means that musical performance is in many ways going back to what it was before say 1860. I believe most music performance will be done locally, for minimal or no money, and that eventually this will be understood and accepted. The difference from 1860 is that there will still be "pasteurized music product" produced by giant (probably AI) machines in LA and NYC, and that's what'll be piped into youth boutiques, the putative performers of it will continue to fill stadiums with pre-teen girls to watch and sway along to said pasteurized music product, delivered by beautiful young front-people dressed in not too much clothing and backed by a corps of exquisitely choreographed dancers... yeah, but actual music making is going to be further and further from that experience.

My smart-ass comment on the future of music making is that the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons will have a constant diet of mental white-out delivered in the form of this pasteurized musical product, probably all automated in its generation; Betas will get a diet of slightly improved product, maybe with some actual humans involved in it, to mitigate the sameness of the auto-generated stuff; and the Alphas will be going off into the woods with actual instruments and having bluegrass and jazz jam sessions.

So in many ways I'm where Steven is, only I"m not enough of an entrepreneur to create my own scene; but I"m so DONE with scuffling for an ever smaller share of an ever smaller pie, wiht pay rates the same (in devalued money) as they were 40 years ago, and no one cares anyway. I have found that those rare transcendent moments in music making don't require an audience, they don't even require that the people you're making music with be of virtuoso caliber. That's what I'm in it for, that's what I'm chasing, and I've given up the pretense that the money is meaningful.

 

[dbflats]

My bro and I had bands together starting in 1980. We had conversations back then to the effect that " the good days are over".

Yes, we were seeing that in 1980. Couldn't agree more with the above sentiments.

 

[Bander]

The number of 1500 bluegrass gigs here in bluegrass country is about 1, maybe 2 a year in the 1M+ region. Its more likely 100 a head or less for gigs that bring your own sound system. For non PA gigs, many are played free by "friends". I don't do that as a policy, too much invested in gear, and years of woodshedding. Its funny when I turn down gigs for dinner. *They* actually act offended. Its a crazy, crazy thing that a good band that really knows what they are doing, and toting 40k or more in instruments alone, should be expected to play for free. When did this bass ackwards trend start, and why does it continue? There's no way I or the band is going to feel the joy, playing for free. Does anybody? I would feel violated, abused, and used personally.

 

[Don Hergert]

For me it’s always about the gig triangle. My music making is all over the map stylistically and monetarily, but every gig has to have 2 things from the triangle to be worth doing. My triangle includes the following…
1. Good money
2. Good musicians/hang
3. Good music

I like that ^^^.

Our band will do free gigs, selectively. The only way a free gig pays off is if the reason for the event is close to the hearts of everyone playing.

Maybe that fits under "Good Hang", or maybe that should be the 4th consideration in the gig triangle.

 

[Ben Noblit]

The number of 1500 bluegrass gigs here in bluegrass country is about 1, maybe 2 a year in the 1M+ region. Its more likely 100 a head or less for gigs that bring your own sound system. For non PA gigs, many are played free by "friends". I don't do that as a policy, too much invested in gear, and years of woodshedding. Its funny when I turn down gigs for dinner. *They* actually act offended. Its a crazy, crazy thing that a good band that really knows what they are doing, and toting 40k or more in instruments alone, should be expected to play for free. When did this bass ackwards trend start, and why does it continue? There's no way I or the band is going to feel the joy, playing for free. Does anybody? I would feel violated, abused, and used personally.

It's the free market at work. Regardless of how good you think you are, or how much you've plowed into your instruments, you're worth what folks are willing to pay to hear you. Want a $1500 gig? Figure out how to sell 75 $20 tickets.

 

[Sam Sherry]

To me, it means that musical performance is in many ways going back to what it was before say 1860.

Rumor has it that there are countries in which the governments financially support artists, including musicians.

I have found that those rare transcendent moments in music making don't require an audience,

I play jazz. A fun audience is fun but IME it is unwise to play jazz expecting to lean on the audience.

they don't even require that the people you're making music with be of virtuoso caliber.

An interesting point on multiple levels.

One is that I think you're empirically correct, because I'm not a virtuoso and yet the people I am playing with sometimes find those transcendent moments.
I think that at best, once in a while, I'm a virtuo-soso. Y'know, a lotta people can do what I do but it's still somewhat uncommon to be able to do it.

Another one is that a performance can provide a transcendent moment for me but necessarily for every particular listener.

And in the other chair, I can play stuff that doesn't yield a transcendent moment for me but someone in the crowd feels that was the most meaningful thing they experienced all month.

With respect to all of those topics it took me a LONG time to learn not to deny people the validity of their perspective.

 

[Don Kasper]

I'm a virtuo-soso

I'll allow it, Counselor.
Brilliant.

 

[bassmanbrent]

Maybe that fits under "Good Hang", or maybe that should be the 4th consideration in the gig triangle.

Yeah, maybe ‘a good cause’ should be another consideration. My issue with that , however, is that often times the musicians are the only ones donating their time and talent. Tech crew, catering etc are all getting paid but musicians are asked to donate to a good cause… Thanks, but no thanks.

 

[Major Seven]

Rumor has it that there are countries in which the governments financially support artists, including musicians.


I play jazz. A fun audience is fun but IME it is unwise to play jazz expecting to lean on the audience.


An interesting point on multiple levels.

One is that I think you're empirically correct, because I'm not a virtuoso and yet the people I am playing with sometimes find those transcendent moments.
I think that at best, once in a while, I'm a virtuo-soso. Y'know, a lotta people can do what I do but it's still somewhat uncommon to be able to do it.

Another one is that a performance can provide a transcendent moment for me but necessarily for every particular listener.

And in the other chair, I can play stuff that doesn't yield a transcendent moment for me but someone in the crowd feels that was the most meaningful thing they experienced all month.

With respect to all of those topics it took me a LONG time to learn not to deny people the validity of their perspe

Rumor has it that there are countries in which the governments financially support artists, including musicians.

Like communist ones.

 

[Tom Lane]

Like communist ones.

Germany is a communist country? When did that happen?

 

[Steven Ayres]

Germany is a communist country? When did that happen?

Or Australia, or pretty much every rich country but ours.

 

[james condino]

I terms of straight pay offerings, I made more money in high school in the 1980s than I typically get offered today. For a while, this really got under my skin.

A few years ago, I played with a bad that took a completely different approach. They would take gigs with a minimum $50 per person guaranteed pay. BUT- they had a killer professional level merch table. It took a lot of effort and we usually had about $2k upfront in product that was a lot of work to keep well stocked. On that $50 / $350 for the band gig, some nights we would take in $1700-2300 in merch sales. In effect, we were a t shirt company that sponsored a band, but at the end of the day, it paid more like $2-300 per person per gig, sometimes more. Well worth the effort. The better the show, the more merch sales.

People complain about merch and all the other hassles, but that is the game. There is a well known story that the guy who sold merch for the first Beatles US tour made far more $$ than the band took in. Go to Billy Strings show and checkout the 1/4 mile long line for merch and every a$$hat in the audience waiving thiose damned poster tubes after spending another $200. Drunk people love t shirts and overpriced key chains and beer coozies and stickers so they have an immediate tactile memory of the show. Toss a free pile into the audience during the show and everyone swarms the merch table for more. Give out a few for help during the load in and suddenly you have a full road crew.

 

[turf3]

I terms of straight pay offerings, I made more money in high school in the 1980s than I typically get offered today. For a while, this really got under my skin.

A few years ago, I played with a bad that took a completely different approach. They would take gigs with a minimum $50 per person guaranteed pay. BUT- they had a killer professional level merch table. It took a lot of effort and we usually had about $2k upfront in product that was a lot of work to keep well stocked. On that $50 / $350 for the band gig, some nights we would take in $1700-2300 in merch sales. In effect, we were a t shirt company that sponsored a band, but at the end of the day, it paid more like $2-300 per person per gig, sometimes more. Well worth the effort. The better the show, the more merch sales.

People complain about merch and all the other hassles, but that is the game. There is a well known story that the guy who sold merch for the first Beatles US tour made far more $$ than the band took in. Go to Billy Strings show and checkout the 1/4 mile long line for merch and every a$$hat in the audience waiving thiose damned poster tubes after spending another $200. Drunk people love t shirts and overpriced key chains and beer coozies and stickers so they have an immediate tactile memory of the show. Toss a free pile into the audience during the show and everyone swarms the merch table for more. Give out a few for help during the load in and suddenly you have a full road crew.

Well, it's hard to make a clear case that this is really "playing music for money".

After I spend years in a small room practicing, then I pay for all this crap, then I haul it all over the place (oh my aching back), now you tell me I gotta be a T shirt salesman too?

I understand it, but I just don't think I'm going to participate. Like every other time you make a choice, I know that's going to let me out of a lot of experiences, but it's going to let me in for a bunch of other ones.

 

[james condino]

Don't overthink it. Merch becomes another assigned duty in the band, just like someone does booking, someone is usually the music director, I often rewrite all of the charts, et cetera. If you were making $300 a gig, you'd feel a lot diffferent than when you make $40 and break a $120 string.

A month of $300 gigs and I have a pocket full of cash plus some new equipment and had a lot of fun. A month full of $35 charity gigs and I have to cancel the last week because I can't afford gas for my Prius and I'm grumpy.