Should hirers and employers focus on full time musicians first?
29/03/24 08:45
With a finite amount of work, and a growing number of musicians turning out of University each year, should music hirers concentrate on 'full time' musicians first?
Should hirers and employers focus on full time musicians first?
Recently, a report was released by the MU that suggested 43% of full time musicians are existing on < £14,000 per year, and the average being around £20k.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to be making a very good income as a full time musician and engineer, but from talking to colleagues/friends in my network and seeing the sheer number respondents vs job ads, I see how the reported situation was reached - and also partially from observations made during 15 years working as a freelancer in University/Pro School education.
My conclusion - there’s literally too many practitioners and not enough available work to go round to make a full time living for all.
Before I go on - I need to clarify the headline: this blog is only a ‘discussion’ and posing the question, it’s not a definitive answer. But, I can’t hide from the fact that it’s probably designed to be justifiably persuasive! Semi-Pro or hobbyist musicians - this isn’t an attack on you. I promise!
And it's not discussing musicians performing and releasing original music. We're talking largely about jobbing musicians performing function bands, theatres, etc.
Let’s set a foundation for a moment. If you’re a full time musician who derives 100% of their income from playing the instrument live, ‘gigs’ are ‘jobs’. For years, we’d say “I’ve got a gig this weekend” which has a loose and fun overtone to it. But when you say “I’m working this weekend”, the language suggests something meaningful that regular, full time, working people can understand. When you’re working, you’re working.
And if you want to make £25k a year purely from playing, either your fee needs to make that out of the number of gigs you play, or the number of gigs needs to make your yearly target for the fees available.
We should probably also establish that musicians are rarely hired ‘full time’ to play their instrument. Salaried roles are either admin based or in the rare cases where an established show is in the enviable position to salary their players. (Something I firmly have in mind, incidentally).
Now, let’s liken our industry to hiring a tradesperson (like this is a first time hiring a plumber has been compared to hiring a musician!!!) - how many times have you tried to hire a plumber, a gas engineer or a builder to either find that no-one’s available - whether it’s lack of availability for months; they won’t do the job because it won’t earn them enough compared to other jobs they’re offered; or literally no-one replies (suggesting either of the previous two options), the result and conclusion is the same: there’s probably a limited number of people doing the ‘thing’ you need.
Liken that to a musician. I’ve yet to see an ad needing a musician for a professional level show (which I class as anything equal to or above function work) where there are no respondents. If you put up an ad for a gig - you’re more likely to fill it than not.
And this is kinda the problem, and the basis for posing the ‘question’ - should bands, show runners and agencies, prioritise giving work to full time musicians over those who use music as a fun side hustle? That’s not a criticism - by that I mean people with a full time job who play live either for fun or as extra income? I stress for the purposes of the internet - it’s not a criticism!
Because when ads go up, musicians in both camps will be tendering for the job: the full time guys need it because they need the income, and the non-full time guys want the gig because (although the reasons may not be limited to that) they want to play.
The question is obviously going to be a polarising one - on one hand, you’ll have all of the full time guys saying “yes, we should be considered first”, and on the other hand you’ll have the non-full time players complaining that it wouldn’t be fair on them, and “I’m just as good…”, which is also likely true!
We also can’t escape the fact that if you’re not a full time player, the only way to get to being a full time player is by surviving on a full time job and building up your business until you have enough predictable regular income to just survive on the music work. How would this affect them? There’s always a demographic that’ll be stuck in the middle somewhere, and that’s probably it in this scenario.
But it does come back to the immediate problem - there’s a significant number of musicians out there trying to make a good living out of the work that they can get access to, and, according to the MU at least, it’s obviously not enough.
The other thing that the report doesn’t go into is how much work the reported demographic are actually doing - and how much they’re making per day. And we also can’t even predict, because we don’t know if the totals reported are gross, after/before tax, net, or after all of our deductions that we’re allowed. We also don’t know what kind of work - orchestras? Function bands? Theatre? Pit? Touring? Teaching? Licensing? Known artist tours? It’s also a survey of MU members. Are they working to MU rates?
We can only really surmise from our own experiences and our own observations and this discussion here is probably limited to the depping and the band world.
And my observation - there’s just too many people trying to tap into a finite amount of work.
And it’s all work that’s constricted by budgets. Private clients have a budget, which dictates the earning capacity of each member of a band. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s pretty low. Touring companies have a budget. Sometimes it’ll be good, sometimes it’ll be tight. Touring is fudging expensive.
And this does touch on the other question of fees - your total yearly income is tied to how much you work for.
Of course, you have the power to set your rate and, arguably you probably should. It’s a fairly simple equation - how much do you want to earn each year divided by the number of conceivable working days. Whether a hiring client agrees to pay it is another thing entirely! The market will dictate - if you get hired and regularly, awesome. If it all goes well, you can try and increase over time. If you don’t get hired, you should probably look at your rate and consider lowering it until clients bite, although there’s no doubt people will likely push their budget a bit if it’s a case of securing someone they like/trust.
If that’s still not enough, you’ll have to diversify. Most successful players I know will do a multitude of things, and the main one is teaching!!!
We can argue and bitch on social posts about whether an advertised fee is enough, or whether people should simply be paying more, but unless you run a band and have to deal with budgets, It’s hard to appreciate how difficult it can be to get a client to buy *your* product at *your* fee, or have deal with touring overheads and whether a show, or a series of shows, will run at a profit or loss - where you’re the one having to suffer the financial consequences of a loss situation. It's like any business - and it’s not fun!
I know for a fact that if I paid musicians what I wanted to pay them - my company would have been in a loss for the last two years! It’s getting bigger, and better, and we’ll adjust our pay when we feel it’s not going to cause us financial difficulty. Right now, it’s not consistent. Until we can for-see more stability - we’re paying what can be afforded.
It might seem like we’re straying from the original question, but it’s actually relevant. We need enough money to be able to live. If we’re doing music full time, we need that work to pay our bills but we also have to deal with market rates and what’s affordable. After all, if a band or show isn’t profitable - it won’t be around for very long, and that’s another potential job gone so it’s important to work to your means.
If you have a show or band that’s in demand, and is booked 100 nights a year, and can afford £350 a night for players - amazing. Hold onto that job, and commit to it, for all it’s worth!!! But that’s not every band, and certainly not representative of the entire market.
So where there’s finite work, and regular available fees sit around a figure, and full time players and professionals need that work to survive - should we be prioritising hiring our full time colleagues for our work to give them the best chance of developing a comfortable living?
Seriously - the music industry is a crazy crazy crazy place!!
Recently, a report was released by the MU that suggested 43% of full time musicians are existing on < £14,000 per year, and the average being around £20k.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to be making a very good income as a full time musician and engineer, but from talking to colleagues/friends in my network and seeing the sheer number respondents vs job ads, I see how the reported situation was reached - and also partially from observations made during 15 years working as a freelancer in University/Pro School education.
My conclusion - there’s literally too many practitioners and not enough available work to go round to make a full time living for all.
Before I go on - I need to clarify the headline: this blog is only a ‘discussion’ and posing the question, it’s not a definitive answer. But, I can’t hide from the fact that it’s probably designed to be justifiably persuasive! Semi-Pro or hobbyist musicians - this isn’t an attack on you. I promise!
And it's not discussing musicians performing and releasing original music. We're talking largely about jobbing musicians performing function bands, theatres, etc.
Let’s set a foundation for a moment. If you’re a full time musician who derives 100% of their income from playing the instrument live, ‘gigs’ are ‘jobs’. For years, we’d say “I’ve got a gig this weekend” which has a loose and fun overtone to it. But when you say “I’m working this weekend”, the language suggests something meaningful that regular, full time, working people can understand. When you’re working, you’re working.
And if you want to make £25k a year purely from playing, either your fee needs to make that out of the number of gigs you play, or the number of gigs needs to make your yearly target for the fees available.
We should probably also establish that musicians are rarely hired ‘full time’ to play their instrument. Salaried roles are either admin based or in the rare cases where an established show is in the enviable position to salary their players. (Something I firmly have in mind, incidentally).
Now, let’s liken our industry to hiring a tradesperson (like this is a first time hiring a plumber has been compared to hiring a musician!!!) - how many times have you tried to hire a plumber, a gas engineer or a builder to either find that no-one’s available - whether it’s lack of availability for months; they won’t do the job because it won’t earn them enough compared to other jobs they’re offered; or literally no-one replies (suggesting either of the previous two options), the result and conclusion is the same: there’s probably a limited number of people doing the ‘thing’ you need.
Liken that to a musician. I’ve yet to see an ad needing a musician for a professional level show (which I class as anything equal to or above function work) where there are no respondents. If you put up an ad for a gig - you’re more likely to fill it than not.
And this is kinda the problem, and the basis for posing the ‘question’ - should bands, show runners and agencies, prioritise giving work to full time musicians over those who use music as a fun side hustle? That’s not a criticism - by that I mean people with a full time job who play live either for fun or as extra income? I stress for the purposes of the internet - it’s not a criticism!
Because when ads go up, musicians in both camps will be tendering for the job: the full time guys need it because they need the income, and the non-full time guys want the gig because (although the reasons may not be limited to that) they want to play.
The question is obviously going to be a polarising one - on one hand, you’ll have all of the full time guys saying “yes, we should be considered first”, and on the other hand you’ll have the non-full time players complaining that it wouldn’t be fair on them, and “I’m just as good…”, which is also likely true!
We also can’t escape the fact that if you’re not a full time player, the only way to get to being a full time player is by surviving on a full time job and building up your business until you have enough predictable regular income to just survive on the music work. How would this affect them? There’s always a demographic that’ll be stuck in the middle somewhere, and that’s probably it in this scenario.
But it does come back to the immediate problem - there’s a significant number of musicians out there trying to make a good living out of the work that they can get access to, and, according to the MU at least, it’s obviously not enough.
The other thing that the report doesn’t go into is how much work the reported demographic are actually doing - and how much they’re making per day. And we also can’t even predict, because we don’t know if the totals reported are gross, after/before tax, net, or after all of our deductions that we’re allowed. We also don’t know what kind of work - orchestras? Function bands? Theatre? Pit? Touring? Teaching? Licensing? Known artist tours? It’s also a survey of MU members. Are they working to MU rates?
We can only really surmise from our own experiences and our own observations and this discussion here is probably limited to the depping and the band world.
And my observation - there’s just too many people trying to tap into a finite amount of work.
And it’s all work that’s constricted by budgets. Private clients have a budget, which dictates the earning capacity of each member of a band. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s pretty low. Touring companies have a budget. Sometimes it’ll be good, sometimes it’ll be tight. Touring is fudging expensive.
And this does touch on the other question of fees - your total yearly income is tied to how much you work for.
Of course, you have the power to set your rate and, arguably you probably should. It’s a fairly simple equation - how much do you want to earn each year divided by the number of conceivable working days. Whether a hiring client agrees to pay it is another thing entirely! The market will dictate - if you get hired and regularly, awesome. If it all goes well, you can try and increase over time. If you don’t get hired, you should probably look at your rate and consider lowering it until clients bite, although there’s no doubt people will likely push their budget a bit if it’s a case of securing someone they like/trust.
If that’s still not enough, you’ll have to diversify. Most successful players I know will do a multitude of things, and the main one is teaching!!!
We can argue and bitch on social posts about whether an advertised fee is enough, or whether people should simply be paying more, but unless you run a band and have to deal with budgets, It’s hard to appreciate how difficult it can be to get a client to buy *your* product at *your* fee, or have deal with touring overheads and whether a show, or a series of shows, will run at a profit or loss - where you’re the one having to suffer the financial consequences of a loss situation. It's like any business - and it’s not fun!
I know for a fact that if I paid musicians what I wanted to pay them - my company would have been in a loss for the last two years! It’s getting bigger, and better, and we’ll adjust our pay when we feel it’s not going to cause us financial difficulty. Right now, it’s not consistent. Until we can for-see more stability - we’re paying what can be afforded.
It might seem like we’re straying from the original question, but it’s actually relevant. We need enough money to be able to live. If we’re doing music full time, we need that work to pay our bills but we also have to deal with market rates and what’s affordable. After all, if a band or show isn’t profitable - it won’t be around for very long, and that’s another potential job gone so it’s important to work to your means.
If you have a show or band that’s in demand, and is booked 100 nights a year, and can afford £350 a night for players - amazing. Hold onto that job, and commit to it, for all it’s worth!!! But that’s not every band, and certainly not representative of the entire market.
So where there’s finite work, and regular available fees sit around a figure, and full time players and professionals need that work to survive - should we be prioritising hiring our full time colleagues for our work to give them the best chance of developing a comfortable living?
Seriously - the music industry is a crazy crazy crazy place!!
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