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Summary: Money makes a music tour go round and without it touring would be impossible. Learn about this important part of being a touring musician from an expert at planning tours in this free video clip.
Peter Nevland has spent five years performing his mixture of writing and rock 'n' roll, which he calls "Spoken Groove," during his travels to every continent except South America and...read more
"How much do you charge people for your time? It's real easy to figure something like that out when you're talking about a CD, a tee-shirt that you've made, because you have a fixed cost and you worked on it and you designed it. You would normally pay a designer for something like that, but it's a little bit easier because you're saying "Well, in general I want to double the price of my costs", right? But when you're talking about something where I just show up and I'm talking to you for a while, how do I decide? How much do I charge someone for that? Well, it's important when you're thinking about that to look at, how much am I planning on making in a year? What are my needs for actually surviving? How many shows am I planning on doing in a year? If I say, for instance, "Okay, I'm planning on performing 100 shows in a year". Well, if I wanted to make any kind of decent money, I'm going to have to at least set a price of somewhere around $500. Let's multiply that out, $500 times 100 shows, that's $50,000 in a year. Sounds pretty good, right? The problem is, is that you're not always going to get your $500 for the show, you might not have 100 shows, and then also you're going to have lots of expenses that come in there. If you're only bringing in $50,000 and your expenses are $20,000, suddenly you're not making $50,000, you're making $30,000. So you need to decide, "Hey, what is it worth, what do I need to make"? And another big thing is "Hey, look at the competition, what are other people charging, can I charge just a little bit less and still come out good, can I charge more"? You need to value yourself and value your time. When people say "How much should I pay you"? Then what you should have ready for them is "What I usually get is $800 for a show. I can go as low as $500, but I need to at least make that much, and people normally pay me $800". Do people normally pay you? I don't know. But you tell them that that's your normal price, and then if they at least pay your $500 price, you're okay."
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