Why Professional Musicians Have Day Jobs
I started working as a part-time professional musician in 1981. I averaged three performances a week and made between $73 and $75 a night with some gigs paying $100.
I was 17 years old at the time, and this was really good money with a lot of purchasing power. I had no idea at the time that inflation was going to be chipping away at that purchasing power for the rest of my career in music.
I was making about $225 a week. If you figure for inflation over the last few decades, that had the purchasing power of what $716 a week would now. It would be like making over $37,000 a year.
Comparing 1981 to 2022 (when this post was last updated) isn’t all apples and oranges though, as week-night gigs were at least 4 hours and weekends were frequently 5 hours back then. So in 1981, with my three gigs combined, I was performing about 12 to 15 hours of music weekly. I think my main gigs were all 4-hours each though, so I’ll use 12 hours as the basis for comparison.
In 1981 I performed an average of 12 hours of music weekly at about $18.75 per hour. Figure for inflation, and that would be the equivalent of about $60.00 per hour now.
This last year, I performed an average of about 8 hours of music weekly (still spread out over 3 gigs) at about $25 per hour.
Over time, the number of hours available to perform has been reduced by a third, and the purchasing power of the pay for that work has been cut in half.
In 2022, I now have 4 hours a week (that are no longer available for performing) to try to earn the additional $516 needed to make up for the purchasing power my music earnings have lost.
Put another way, my purchasing power from the money earned for an hour of music performance is now about 27% of what it was when I started out in 1981.
While the numbers may vary a bit depending on how you do your math, the underlying theme of this story remains the same. For many professional musicians, the purchasing power of the dollars we earn performing music has shrunk significantly over the last four decades. This is likely why so many of us do other types of work to supplement our music income.