What is a musicians salary?

Question by informereletter: What is a musicians salary?
Assuming you have a record contract with an indie record label, such as Tooth And Nail records, or Gotee Records, and had 4 people in your band. How much would my personal salary the first year be if you sell about 20,000 records, and play about 150-200 tour dates? And, would it jump significantly if the second album sells better?

Best answer:

Answer by Rachel_S165
You don’t get a salary. You’re not an employee of the record company.

You and the band get royalties on the sale of your records (“mechanical royalties”) — so much for each copy sold — which the band members would have to split amongst themselves. You would also get songwriter royalties on every song that you wrote that was recorded on the album (if you co-write with a band member, then the two of you would split the songwriter royalty). Then the music publishing company gets a royalty equal to the songwriter royalty. A lot of songwriters start their own little companies to publish the songs they write so that they get to keep the publisher’s royalty for themselves.

Don’t forget that the record company will put up the money for recording expenses — studio rental, the producer’s fee, the cost of hiring session musicians if needed, the engineer’s salary, etc — but YOU (the band) have to pay them back for all of those costs out of your mechanical royalties first, BEFORE you actually make a dime off of the sales of your record.

Then there are concert tour revenues. And of course gross ticket sale revenue can vary hugely depending on how much your band charges for each concert and the number of people in the audience. If you can only count on drawing audiences of 200 people a show, you’re going to make a lot less money than if you can bring in a crowd of 5,000 per show. Ticket sales minus all the expenses of being on tour (hotels, meals, travel, etc etc etc) equals the band’s profit, which again gets split amongst all of the band members.

Oh — and if you have a manager and/or a booking agent getting you these gigs and negotiating these contracts for you — they get their percentages (15% maybe more) off the top of everything your band makes, BEFORE expenses.

If you think that being in a band with an indie record label contract is the fast track to fame and fortune, think again. If you’re lucky you’ll get to earn enough money to pay your bills and keep a roof over your head while doing what you love, but that’s it, unless you get REALLY lucky and sell way more than 20,000 copies of your record.

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