Fair Trade Music
I was recently offered a show for my seven piece - 1 1/2 hours of music for $50 and "Good Karma."
So, I figured it out with setup/tear down time, travel time and fuel cost. Being a huge dork, I put it into an excel spreadsheet. This made it faster and easier to play with the numbers.
For seven people the $50 would have translated to $2.18 an hour.
Compare their $50 to the $190 that would have paid those musicians Oregon minimum wage for their services.
Incidentally, it also worked out to $26 apiece - pretty crappy pay for doing a show in a city 1/2 an hour away! I don't suggest you use minimum wage for actual bidding, but, rather, as an educational tool. I frequently use a fast-food analogy: "Well, when you go out to eat, do you eat at places that pay their cooks minimum wage?"
Such tools may be useful for people who don't consider music to be a service, who don't consider musicians' services worth compensating, and who consider music to be an amateur, hobbyist pursuit, not the realm of professionals or workers.
These perceptions are products of the steady devaluation musicians and their services have suffered over the last thirty years.
Educating presenters/purchasers about the time costs involved with performing gives them a different perspective, one that I've had good results with- few people try to argue that your time is worth less than minimum wage. I actually convinced a dancer - quite unintentionally - to finance a group of drummers based on this model.
It's a tough place - we practice hard to be able to perform well, and it's never easy to turn down shows. That, however, gets complicated - I'll deal with it in another blog entry..
I recently convinced some people putting on a benefit to pay the band minimum wage, plus an hour for travel and setup. They did so begrudgingly, which seemed like a minor victory until I came home from the show. Everyone in the band made $16.80. Ouch.
ReplyDeleteStung, I bid twice as much for the next show, and the presenter - a wealthy businessman - never got back to me.
Although I fought to have the campaign's minimum guarantee be precisely that - minimum wage, including an hour for travel and setup/teardown - I realized it's actually kind of a crappy deal!!
The advantages: it's very difficult for people to call it exorbitant, difficult to argue that minimum wage would make musicians sufficiently complacent to not promote the show, and it's better than what a lot of clubs are paying right now.