Well I've written about this before...these days, for free is the norm. If I've thrown a few hundred gigs, I've been paid for maybe a dozen, and even then only maybe twice or so the pay has actually covered the costs.
Thinking about a local gig...they simply will not pay you. Nowhere. The best they can offer is let you have a few buck cover charge you collect yourself...but they won't allow that on good nights. Any given fri-sat night there will be a gold-selling artist or two playing in a bar within a 2-mile radius and a big international in some nearby town anyway, so there will be no crowd if you do.
If you want ANY public there, the only option is to do it for free, in which case you might land a gig spot on some Friday or Saturday in a local bar once or twice a year...or a bar farther away. Might get a case of beer for the gig, plus they'll usually arrange the soundman and PA.
If you get 50 gigs under your belt for free, and some radio play, you can start asking for ~300 or so for gigs in neighboring towns...which will just barely pay for the hotel and gas, but in the long run be clearly negative for cash flow too.
I've played festivals and won a national rock video 3rd place award, had national TV video play for a month's rotation, had two dozen songs appear on national radio from one to a dozen plays each, and I never made a dime, just thousands of loss, when you calculate all costs and whatnot.
An idea of actually making money/selling my music is f***ing laughable to me.
It simply will never happen in volumes that would matter at all.
The only thing people buy these days is pretty idols kid's music...the ratio otherwise is, if a million people have heard my stuff, five of those have paid/bought it, a few hundred have leeched it for free, and the rest just listen to it live online.
Every bloody pupil into music in my school for instance has a collection of tens of thousands of songs on their iPods, all leeched off warez sites for free.
IF they pay for music, it's Spotify, or Nokia's comes with music, Pandora, or some other thing they can just stream with practically no cost. Everybody has a cell phone with 3G/WLAN anyway, and they watch youtube and listen to spotify etc. all day long no problem. I suspect many of those 16-yr olds never even owned or used a CD even.
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Originally Posted by MichaelE
