Pricing and Selling a Gig

Hey musicians, what's up? I've heard a bunch of people have asked me, How do they effectively price a gig and then market the gig. Like we've went over some separate components that each address that, but none of them really put it all together. And so I would love to share with you how this works. Because once I figured this out, it made it super easy to figure out how much to charge for each gig, and then how to justify that price. And, you know, once you are able to do that, you're able to confidently throw out your price in any conversation, and justify it, and then people will book you. Plus, on the backside, when your musicians are ready to be paid. They are more than happy with what you're offering them. So the two tools that come into play here are the gig offer stack, which that's how to help justify a price that you've already created. But the other tool is the gig payout schedule, which I'm not sure I exactly addressed on this podcast, and now would be an amazing time to do that. So the first question to answer is, how much should I charge for a gig? I did address that loosely, like in one of our early episodes, but I want to be very specific about that now. And especially if you're running a group of musicians, and you might get sound engineers involved, and different people have different pay requirements, say some people are bringing more equipment than others or you pay your lead vocalist more than you pay your guitarist. You know, I'm not here to make judgments or decisions on how you do that. But I'm here to help you figure out the how to make that work. So the gig payout schedule is essentially a table in like, you know, if you're doing an Excel sheet, each line of your Excel sheet would basically have each component of your gig. So if you're doing a string quartet, you would have four lines to start violin one violin to Viola and cello, you know, adopt that to your specific instrumentation. And then for each instrument in the second column, you need to figure out how much you're paying each individual person. Some groups pay all instruments, the same flat rate, some of them pay different depending on other factors, which I just mentioned before. And so in the column to the right of each instrument, go ahead and put those numbers. Now, in another podcast episode, I also mentioned how being a bandleader is extra work and you're doing more work that deserves to be compensated. So go ahead and add another row to this table, which you can call profit margin or bandleader, or gig organizer, however you want to call it and decide what kind of profit you need to make on each gig in order to compensate you for your band leading, and maybe to pay back some of that marketing costs that you've invested to get the gig. So add that in, might be easy to just do a 20% profit margin on that. That's pretty standard for booking agencies. And then what you do is you put that number in the right column, and then add one final row below all of the instruments and the bandleader fee. And that is your total. So add everything up. And that's how you get your price. So I do this for all different kinds of timings. Like I'll do it for an hour of my string quartet, I'll do it for two hours, I'll have different tables for if I'm doing a four piece band or a three piece band. And that's the gig payout schedule. Now, the total is the number that you are going to be charging people. And that plugs into your gig offer stack. Because at the end of the day, you're trying to justify that price by building up the value or at least the perceived value of what you're bringing to each gig. So in the gig offer stack, I mentioned this in the other podcast, I'm just going to go over it briefly here is in this section, you're going to detail out, it's like another table, you're going to add line items to this table for all of the different components that you're bringing to a gig. And this is where we get a little deeper we it's not just about who you're paying, it's about you know, I am bringing four people and each person's time is valued at X dollars, and multiply that up, put that in the column on the right. But they're also bringing instruments so you can kind of ballpark the value of the instruments they're bringing and put that as another line item and add that in the column to the right. So you get the instruments and how much they're worth. But also if you're running sound, you know that has an equipment rental fee, and that also has the time of the sound engineer. And those could be separate line items in your offer stack. Plus, you're probably going to be spending your personal time consulting with the client who's booked the gig. So Add that to your offer stack. If you have a large song list, you know, you could put the value of each song, how much did it cost you to either purchase the sheet music for each song or the time spent learning each song, add that to your offers deck, because you're bringing that to each gig. You can also add your experience how many gigs you've played like, that is a valuable thing that you're bringing to the gig. And that'll ensure that the gig goes smoothly. And some people could add that to the offer stack as $1 amount or as like a priceless line item. And so you're adding up all these components in the offer stack to figure out the perceived value of what you're bringing. And ideally, you would come up with a number that is 10 times as high as the total from your gig payout schedule. That's where the concept of selling dollars for diamonds comes into play, where you want it to literally be just as easy as like, Hey, I'll give you this dollar bill, if you just give me a dime. Because you're saying the value of this gig is 10 times the amount what we're charging it. And once you do that, it makes it really easy to sell the gig people are like I understand I'm getting an amazing deal. You're only charging me 1/10 of what this thing is actually worth. And you were able to do this as a bandleader because he went through the process of figuring out what is your gig payout schedule, and it's consistent for each gig, you know, it's not like you're reinventing the wheel each time. And then you throw that number into your gig offer stack. And voila, a fully complete circle of pricing the gig making sure everybody feels fairly compensated, and then comfortably being able to market and sell the gig because you're just so darn sure that what I'm bringing to the table is worth at least 10 times the amount that I'm charging for it. So at the end of the day, it feels amazing, because there's no guesswork. You didn't have to get a business degree to do this. And you're not under charging. Nobody in the band is feeling like they are getting paid less than what they deserve. And the client is happy because they're getting an amazing product and they feel good about spending your rates, spending their budget on what you're charging. So I hope that helps. That's how the gig payout schedule and the offer stack work together. If you got any value out of this, I'd appreciate a subscribe to this podcast or like to this episode, join our gigging musicians Facebook group where we're chatting all the time about things like this. And follow me on Instagram. My handle is Jared Judge. I've been posting a lot more of these kinds of tips on Instagram too. And I think they're valuable. It helps at least, you know, similar tips to this. So just go ahead and follow me on Instagram. I'd love to hear from you and connect with you further. Thanks for listening. See you next episode.