One of my most dreaded questions during my career as a professional musician was “how much do you charge for…?” I hated it for two main reasons: first, I hated to have to draw attention away from the music and onto money. Second, I always felt like no matter what was said, I’d either ask too much and not get hired or worse, get hired easily and suspect that I could have asked for more money.
Either way, my thinking was wrong.
One, if you’re playing music for a living, you’re PLAYING MUSIC FOR A LIVING! Sorry to yell, but it does come down to money. Put simply, your very life depends on earning money through playing music. Don’t be ashamed of it, run from it, deny it or forget it.
With number one out of the way, we’re left with number two: which is how to determine exactly how much to charge for…? I’ve written on this before, but I came across a post from Brian Fling at Blue Flavor that suggests some very helpful tools. His basic point is to “price what it costs”. He’s basically flipping the question back around to the fact that music is your living. Whether you realize it or not, it costs you money (time) to do anything in your life. If you know what it costs, then what you charge for your time starts to makes sense.
Of his two tools, we’ll start with Brian’s second. It’s a tool he uses to determine your hourly rate. expenses รท hrs worked per yr. + margin = hourly rate
Sit down with a pad and paper and write out all your expenses. Ask yourself what it takes to live your life and include everything from food to internet access and everything in between. You can do this for a month or a year, just make sure you’re consistent across this whole equation. Also, make sure you’re being realistic (I do encourage you to dream of the life you’d LIKE to be able to afford, but not at the moment). Now, divide that amount by the number of hours you’ll most likely work during the same time period. Take that last number and multiply it by 10% (0.1) and add that to the same number. You now have an hourly rate that covers 10% over your expenses.
Next, use this: task x time(complexity x effort) x rate = price
I’ll illustrate this from personal experience: I was a drummer who was often hired to play on people’s records. So, one task would have been recording the drums for one song. Typically, I could record one song in about 30 minutes. 1 song times 30 minutes.
However, there’s no such thing as “typically” and that’s where (complexity x effort) comes in to play. One example of complexity would be who the other musicians were. If it was a team I worked with all the time, the day would require little effort. If it was an unknown bunch of folks, there was no telling! In the first case, I could record 3 or 4 songs an hour. With the second bunch, it might take an hour or two to get one track done.
If your answer to equation one is $100.00 per hour, and you’ve been asked to record 4 songs with people you know take a long time to record, your answer might look like this:
4 songs times 30 minutes (easy songs times inexperienced musicians = 30 extra minutes per song) times $100.00 per hour = $400.00.
How much do you charge to record 4 songs? $400.00
There are a few challenges to what’s said here, but I’ll save those for another day…
