So you are a pretty good musician? You play your instrument hours and hours per day and would like nothing more than to make a living playing on big time records. This article will explain the realities of playing music for money and hopefully shed some light on the topics of actually making a living with your guitar, bass, drum, or piano playing.

Let's Talk Economics A Second

Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you too badly. However, before you get too excited about banging on drums or ripping big guitar solos for money, we need to think about reality for just a second. Just like everything in our capitalist society, the price is something is directly related to supply and demand. (Okay, economics jargon is almost over). You need to think about how much demand there is for kick ass musicians from paying sources (major label recordings, live gigs, and.....well....I guess that is it) and think about how many other people are competing for the same exact gigs.

Let's think about GIT for a second. A lot of guitar players dream of going to GIT. If you make it through GIT, you are a badass. There is no doubting that. Lots of bedroom shredders have the highest respect for GIT graduates. They are like the Jedi of guitar players. While I've known many guitar players who said they were going to go and even filled out the application to go to GIT, I don't know a singer person who actually went through with it. Why? Well, it's an ambitious jump to move across the country (or at least fairly far away from home) and drop your college money into guitar playing. This, by default, will separate a lot of the men from the boys.

Note: I'm sure there are advanced schools for drumming, bass playing, piano playing, etc but as a shredder guitar kind of guy GIT was always THE guitar school. So, use the same concept to apply to your particular instrument.

Now, let's say that only 20 people graduate from GIT (or your applicable school) per year. I've got a feeling that this is a grossly conservative figure. In fact, there are probably 1,000 graduates of GIT per year for all I know. For our figures, let's just say there are only 20 per year. So in the past 15 years, there have been 300 graduates of GIT. We'll say that 5 of these graduates or in big bands (Collective Soul, Matchbox 20, etc). So we have 295 robo badass, Jedi guitar players running around New York, LA, and Nashville (and maybe a few other towns).

How many sessions are there per year? If we said there are 100,000 well paying guitar gigs per year, that would mean that each guitar Jedi would get a little more than 300 gigs per year. If we said there were 10,000 well paying guitar gigs per year, that would mean that there are only about 30 well paying guitar gigs per guitar player. (This doesn't look as promising all of a sudden). On top of that, we are assuming there are only 300 guitar Jedis. What if there are 3,000? We are down to 3 well paying gigs per year. (If there are only 1,000 well paying guitar gigs, we are down to .3 gigs per guitar player...OUCH!).

The Reality Of Being A Session Player

In reality, even areas with lots of audio recording going on (like Nashville, for example) there are not that many guys making a good living at just playing session gigs. There are way more people who would love to play on big sessions that there are big sessions.

Recently a close friend of mine got to play a show with the members of one of the biggest country bands in the world. The shocking truth is the members of this band simply weren't playing music full time even though they were mega, robo, Jedi world class musicians. Why? Because there simply aren't enough paying gigs for these guys (who are playing some of the biggest gigs on the planet) to make a decent living. These guys are also running construction companies and doing jobs that are a lot more “normal” than playing shows for 30,000 people a night.

Ironically, the world class musicians are getting paid relatively little for their tremendous services (such as playing drums for 30,000 people). However, the person who wrote the hit song in his basement, might be making millions and millions simply because he/she wrote a few catchy tunes that took off. The real lesson from this article is (with most things) the real money is in innovation, not perfection. The people creating the hit songs are making more than adequate livings. However, the people flawless executing these songs night after night are pursuing other avenues of making a living.

Conclusion

Making a living as a professional musician, is not easy. It's a long shot, just like being a pro athlete or become a movie star. While there are certainly people who've achieved success in the studio musician world, just keep in mind that it's not an easy road. If you do achieve it, you still may need to find other ways to make a living.

However, the songwriting world is also very competitive (ironically, my gut says that is not as competitive as the studio musician world) it also has the opportunity to be much more lucrative. So, if you hit the jackpot with a hit song, you will get paid.

Just in case anyone is upset that this article is about money, I need to remind everyone that this article is about making a career, which implies making money to pay the house payment and put food on the table. (It sucks that I have to even defend myself from fundamentalist artists, but this is a typical problem when taking a real world approach to the music business).