Untangling the Financial Realities of a Music Career

Money Matters is a NewMusicBox x I CARE IF YOU LISTEN collaboration, supported by New Music USA.

This isn’t one of those recipe blogs where you scroll past six paragraphs with inset ads about a transformative trip to Target, a breakup at a lavender farm, and Grandma’s haunted bundt pan before you get to the ingredients. Honestly, no offense. Those blogs are my jam, too. Pun absolutely intended. But you’re here for something else: real info and clear strategies for how to make the financial side of your creative life actually work. Let’s dive in.

Know Your Offer, Know Your Worth

What are the verbs you want to get paid for?

Not what your mentor did. Not what your parents envisioned. What do you want? Teaching? Performing? Composing? Running workshops? Producing awesome ambient records in your shed? Running a music series with excellent snacks?

Grab a notebook and list them all out. These are your offers, and once you know them, you can build the containers that make them payable. For a composer, this might include per-minute commission rates, licensing existing work for use in film/media, offering composition lessons, residencies with stipends, or selling scores online. You are not limited to what your degree program outlined for you — build the business you actually want.

Now let’s price it using a formula from the inspiring Andrew Simonet of Artists U:

1. Choose your ideal annual income. Use gross income for this calculation.
2. Decide how many weeks per year you want to work. Many artists choose 44 to account for holidays and time off.
3. Divide your income goal by the number of weeks. This is your weekly rate.
4. Divide that number by the actual number of hours you can work per week. Most artists land between 20 and 25. That is your hourly rate.

For example, if you want to make $80,000 a year and work 44 weeks, that’s about $1,818 per week. Divide that by 22 hours and you get roughly $83 per hour. Now apply that rate to a real project. If you are composing a commissioned piece that takes 20 hours of your time, you now know you need to earn around $1,660 from that project before you consider materials, collaborators, or profit margin.

Notice that I didn’t tell you what your numbers should be, because that is your call. Your rent, your student loans, your car payment, your pet’s medication, your life – pricing is personal, not crowd-sourced. Too many musicians try to reverse-engineer their pricing based on what someone else is charging, but you have no idea what that person’s situation is.

• Maybe they got a divorce settlement that included a Steinway, three cats, and a festival fund.
• Maybe they flipped a Renaissance lute on Facebook Marketplace and used the money to pay off their grad school loans.
• Maybe their household budget is built around one full-time income, and their music work isn’t expected to carry the financial weight.
• Maybe they’re living on a farm and trading work for housing.

You do not know.

You can’t build a business around the assumption that everyone else is playing the same game with the same resources. You have to build your career around your numbers, your needs, and your life. Once you have that data, you can raise your rates, add more clients, shift your offer mix, and course-correct as needed. 

Photo by Amol Tyagi, courtesy of Unsplash

Who’s Paying Whom, and for What

Artists often walk into projects with vague expectations and end up doing unpaid labor. Why? Because no one clarified who is paying whom, for what, and when. Let’s fix that.

Start by mapping your ideal clients: who actually writes the check? A university? A presenter? A private student or their caregiver? A grantmaker? A performer with commissioning funds? A nonprofit with a programming budget?

If you don’t know who is paying you, you cannot confirm how or when you are getting paid. And that is how artists get stuck chasing money they should have already received.

Here are a few common payment flows:

• A presenter/org/institution hires you to perform, teach, or create a new work.
• A performer or ensemble commissions you through a consortium, their own funds, or grant support.
• A funder provides financial support to an organization that hires you, or funds you directly through an artist/project grant.
• A venue might provide the space only, or they might offer a guaranteed fee, a percentage of ticket sales (e.g. a “door split”), or nothing at all. If they are not covering your rate, someone/something else needs to.
• You self-produce, paying collaborators and recovering expenses through ticket sales, crowdfunding, or donations.

If you are teaching, performing, composing, consulting, or producing your own shows, every offer you make has a different money trail. Understanding how money moves, whether through contracts, grants, co-productions, honorariums, or backend royalties, helps you ask smarter questions and avoid financial landmines.

This is about putting your offer in front of the people who want it and have access to the resources to support it. If you are building a private studio, hang a flyer in the high school band room. If you want commissions, ask performers about their commissioning process and let them know you’d love to work with them. If you want to book tour dates, pitch presenters and ask about available budgets and timelines during the negotiation process. 

Now my formal plea: use contracts. Every time. Even for a friend. I always say, “Good contracts make good collaborations.” A contract lays out who is paying, how much, when, and what is expected. If someone resists putting it in writing, that is a red flag. Contracts, royalty agreements, and documentation are not bureaucracy. They are your tools that give you clarity and help you spot problems before the project even begins.

This is also why I teach the concept of “positive exchange of value.” What do your collaborators  bring to the table that is valuable to you? What do you offer in return? That value might be funding, a studio recording, a premiere, or a new relationship. You define what makes a project worth your time.

Money in music rarely flows in a straight line. It loops through presenters, funders, donors, collaborators, venues, and artists. If you don’t understand where your payment fits in, you risk working for free, taking on invisible labor, or funding someone else’s dream with your time.

Photo by Amina Atar, courtesy of Unsplash

Systems That Make It Sustainable

If you are constantly flying by the seat of your pants, you are heading straight toward burnout. You need systems.

Start with your money. I recommend the Profit First system because it is designed for variable-income creatives. Every time you get paid, you divide the income into separate accounts for Owner Pay, Taxes, Expenses, and Profit. This gives your money structure, purpose, and a plan.

Use tools that work for your brain and your bandwidth. For bookkeeping: Wave or QuickBooks. For invoicing and payment processing: FreshBooks, HoneyBook, or a simple Stripe or Square setup. If all of that feels overwhelming, even a color-coded spreadsheet is a great starting point as long as you use it consistently.

Take one of your offers — let’s say composing new works on commission — and walk through what it looks like for someone to hire you. If any of the following steps feel confusing or inconsistent, that’s the part of your system that needs attention.

Start with visibility
Make sure people can actually find you and what you offer. This might mean refreshing your website; regularly sharing your offers through social media, your email newsletter, or pitching potential collaborators; registering with composer databases or score platforms; or reaching out to past collaborators. Your network can’t hire you if they don’t know what you are offering.

Make the next step clear and low-pressure
Once you’ve sparked someone’s interest, make it easy for them to keep the conversation going. Share a clear way to respond, like a contact form or email address you actively check. Include a short description of the offer and what happens next. You are guiding them, not expecting them to already know what to do. Don’t leave someone interested in working with you stuck wondering how to proceed.

Respond with clarity
Build an email template that outlines your rates, process, timeline, and what happens next. It doesn’t need to be robotic, but it should make it easy for the person to say yes or ask follow-up questions. This helps you avoid writing a new email from scratch every time.

Confirm the project professionally
Use a scheduling tool like Calendly, or even Google Calendar, to book an initial conversation. Then send a clear outline of key milestones: contract, deposit, draft delivery, revisions, final files, premiere date. Always include a contract that covers scope, timeline, payment terms, and rights.

Make payment seamless
Use an invoicing tool that allows for card or bank transfer payments. You can require a deposit to reserve your time (e.g. “half up-front and half upon score delivery”), and decide ahead of time whether you offer payment plans. Your professionally creative life will run more smoothly when you’re not chasing down unpaid invoices.

Follow up with intention
After the project wraps, ask for a testimonial, request access to recordings or performance photos, and check in about future opportunities. Keep track of who you’ve worked with and where those relationships might lead.

Each of these stages can follow a simple, reusable template. You build the system once, then you refine it over time as you learn what works best for you and your collaborators. When you have systems for how you offer your work, pitch your ideas, and get paid for your time, you aren’t guessing anymore. You’re not holding 20 mental tabs open all the time. Systems create space — not only on your calendar, but in your brain.

Photo by Eden Constantino, courtesy of Unsplash

The Artist as Strategist

Taking yourself seriously as both an artist and a businessperson is not a contradiction. It is creative self-respect.

The democratization of access to music-making, distribution, and career-building has given artists unprecedented control. Yes, we now have the option to wear the hats of entrepreneurs, negotiators, and financial decision-makers, but that’s not a burden; it can be your power. Knowing your numbers does not cheapen your artistry. Generating income does not make you a sellout. Asking for a contract does not make you difficult. These are the tools that keep your work alive and your energy intact.

So choose one step from this essay and try it this week:

• Rework your pricing with your actual numbers
• List your offers and build containers around them
• Identify your ideal clients and create a pitch list
• Open a separate tax savings account and automate deposits
• Map the workflow for one offer and write down templates

You are a builder. A strategist. A working artist. Nobody is coming to hand you a career, but that’s the good news:  you get to make something that works for you.

Let’s get to work.

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