Are You Undercharging for Your Gigs?

What's up gigging musicians. Today I want to chat about pricing, and specifically, are you under pricing yourself. So when I started my gigging string quartet, back in 2016 ish, I had no idea what to charge. My only frame of reference was that I knew I was getting at least 100 bucks a gig back when I played for somebody else's wedding String Quartet back in the day. And you know, to a young musician, 100 bucks per gig is is nice, that's a great deal. I hear nowadays, anyone, I've heard people getting paid anywhere in the range of nothing, all the way up to like 1000s of dollars per gig. And it's a huge range. And I just quite frankly, have no idea or had no idea what to charge at the point where I was starting my string quartet. And so, you know, I wanted to definitely start at 100 bucks a gig minimum. But even that I felt was too low. So I went and did a little bit of digging, and did a little bit of reverse engineering mystery shopping of some of the other quartets around in my city and other cities. And I started to find for wedding ceremonies, people were charging anywhere between$400 and $1,000, for the whole quartet. And I kind of started to do some math on that, you know, a quartet string quartet, four members, two violins, a viola and a cello. And I assumed, okay, for let's just divide the price that they're paying for the entire quartet, divided by four, and I got anywhere between$100.02 $150 per musician. And, you know, that was a really good starting point. But then I started to think about some other factors that affected the price. One of those factors being Oh, if there's a gig that's 150 miles away, 100 bucks is not going to cut it. 150 is not even going to cut it. So I started to realize, oh, okay, I needed to think about travel fees, what am I going to charge for travel. And at that point, that was when I made a big discovery was that I found the musician's Union, the American Federation of musicians, afm.org, they actually have salary guidelines. So you can go on Google right now, and search AFM wage scale. And you'll find a PDF that's put together by one of the musicians, local chapters, that has specific rates that musicians should be charging should be paid, actually. And they break it down by the type of gig. And so when I found that there was awesome back at that point, I think I found the Philadelphia 2014 wage scale. That was when I saw the minimum that union musician players get at that point, for a single one off engagement of up to an hour and a half of playing is $120. So instantly, I had a nice reference point, I want to pay at least $120. And then I looked further down on the page, and I saw a travel fee. And the crazy part was, they actually had a table of different travel rates, depending on mileage. Like they would say, zero to 20 miles is no travel charge 11 miles, or 21 miles to 30 miles is like five bucks. It's and so forth. the crazy part was I put that in there like Excel just to figure out what's the formula they're using. And I found that there was no formula. In fact, there was a couple entries in that table where the Union had higher mileage rates. So like larger mileage amounts that paid less than smaller amounts. So the math was completely wrong on that. But I kind of removed some of those weird data points, and figured out that there was kind of a formula, it was about 25 cents a mile that they were charging on average. But that didn't feel right. That was when, you know, I remembered from one of my non music jobs that if you ever had to drive and use your own car, you were eligible for mileage reimbursement. And I knew that that was a federal thing. So I went on the government website and searched US Federal mileage rate. And at that point, I discovered the federal mileage reimbursement rate was 55 cents per mile. And I realized, okay, the union has got this wrong, I need to be using this 55 cents per mile per musician charge to so that my musicians are fairly paid. So that was kind of how I discovered the mileage rate system. But I realized that for most gigging groups, the union wage scale won't actually work for them because the musicians union is traditionally it's for you know, opera and Broadway and You know, the the type of musician that isn't necessarily gigging or making their living gigging, they've got those big jobs that you know, as you know, I, I got second place where I never got one of those big jobs where I would be a union musician, although I do work with several union musicians, and they tell me a lot of crazy stories about that. So that was when I realized that I needed a formula for pricing, my string quartet, and specifically, a individuales, musicians take home pay, that really worked for my group. And it wasn't what the musician was going to tell us what to do is what we actually wanted. So that was when I set out to ask my players individually on a one on one basis, a conversation private conversation that none of the other members were privy to, what do you think is fair? And, you know, let's boil it down to one hour of playing, what do you think is fair, so I would get a number from them. And I would compare it against all of the other numbers that I was getting from the rest of my members. And I got a nice number, it actually averaged out pretty nicely. It's not like there was any outliers who wanted 1000 bucks a gig and some who was like, Oh, just pay me 20 bucks in the six pack. So I averaged that together. I asked the same question for more longer durations of time, just to kind of get a little bit of an idea of, you know, if we play a two hour gig, what what should that be average that together, multiplied those rates by four. So I got my one hour rate, and then added on the travel charges as necessary. But then I made a discovery that if I charged, just what the musicians are taking home at the end of the day, that is the biggest recipe for a not profitable online business. It's a recipe for an online business that loses money, because 100% of the money we're making is going to the suppliers, there's no money being reinvested back to get us more gigs. That was the big aha moment for me is that it takes money to get a gig, I'm paying marketing spend, you know, I'm paying to be listed in certain online directories, I am spending time reaching out to my dream 100 List of venues, wedding planners, etc. And, you know, this is time that I'm not donating. If I was donating it, then I wouldn't be making a career out of it, I'd just be a volunteer for a nonprofit. And so I'm spending all this time and this money. And I'm not building in a profit to the amount of money that my quartet is making, so that I can afford this stuff. So a big red flag there, it's a losing business model. And that was when I realized, okay, so I'm under charging, I can't just charge 100% of my supplier costs, which is what the musicians are making, I need to build in a profit. And so that was when I looked back into, you know, what I did in the previous year, and realized, okay, so we're making, we're getting X amount of gigs each year, I'm spending X amount of dollars on my marketing for that year. Plus, I'm spending this amount of time per year, just building out the marketing and coordinating the group. And I kind of figured out, I put $1 amount on that. And once I did that, I divided that by the number of gigs we got, and I got a nice number that I was able to build in on top of my musician costs. And that is the price that I now charge to the people who book my group. So just to recap that I'm charging. One is my profit margin that's going back into the business to get everybody more gigs. And quite frankly, the musicians are happy that I do that, because the more money that I have, and to do that, the more time I have to spend to get them more gigs, so they're happy to get more gigs. I'm also charging a fair rate for what the musicians have actually asked to be compensated for different types of gigs. And then on top of that, I'm charging mileage fees, which is based on the federal 55 cents per musician per mile recommendation. And I lump that all together. And that is most of the pricing formula. Of course, there are a couple extra add ons that I have added like you know what if they want us to learn a custom song, what if they want us to bring a PA and so I have done that? I've added those in but that's really not a part of the core pricing strategy. The real pricing strategy is cost of musicians, plus mileage fee, plus the built in profit margin, and that is the recipe to a profitable music business that enables you to spend your time focused on playing music and getting people gigs getting your music out there in the world. Hope you enjoyed this podcast episode. Please make sure to subscribe and share this podcast and check out all of our training tips. programs that help you build a profitable music business at www dot booklife pro.com. And hope you enjoyed this episode guys. We'll see you soon