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Audacity Works
Audacity Works
When is it ok to perform for free: a re-framing of performing opportunities
Sweet Retreats Mexico: enrolling now (half full!)
CREATRIX: Unleash the Muse coming soon (jump on the information list here!)
Money, it's a Ga$$: a lil bloggy blog on the difference between getting hired vs. self-producing a one-off event
Are you selling yourself short as an artist? Are you pricing yourself out of your market? So many questions, so few actual numbers. We're faced with this hard-hitting question in today’s episode. We confront the discomfort and spill the truth on the controversial issue of performing for free or at a low cost, a plight all too familiar to many artists. Unpack the potential harm of underpriced performances, why it's pivotal to understand industry nuances, and empower yourself with the right questions to ask.
Navigating gig life and differentiating between community, regular, and private events can be daunting, but understanding these nuances is instrumental in setting an appropriate fee.
Don't go back to sleep.
xoRachel
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Welcome to Audacity Works, a podcast inspired by and dedicated to the working artist, the creative entrepreneur and generally doing the damn thing. This exists on the premise that the world belongs to those who have the audacity to believe that their lives have value. This is for you From to Audacity Works. I am your host, rachel Strickland, and this is episode number 43, which is all about when performing for free or cheap is acceptable and when it is not. But first, some announcements. By the time this episode airs, it's going to be Wednesday, something of August, and that means that the retreat that I'm doing with none other than the great blue tornado herself, jenny Tufts, it's going to be at Sweet Retreats in Mexico, and if you're hearing this, that means that it is now public. We offer it as a thank you to our patrons both of our patrons, as a thank you for their ongoing support for a week, so that they get a heads up, and it's already about 52% full, both of those retreats, and I haven't asked in about 24 hours. So if that is of interest to you, if you want to come to Mexico and let Jenny teach you amazing things on a hoop and let her share her spin magic with you, and then let me give you weird creative exercises and tell you odd tasks to do to get to know your inner artist better and put that on stage. Then these are two opportunities for you. There are two retreats one is intermediate and one is advanced, and all of the information is in the link that's in the show notes. If this is something you feel very excited about, I would not recommend dragging your feet, because last time it filled up in like four hours. So another announcement is that I am planning a retreat here at my home in the beautiful, magnificent low country of Edisto Island, south Carolina. It's going to be in late May of next year, 2024, and applications don't open until October. So if you want to be the first to know, number one would be to be on the patron. Number two would be to be to sign up on the list that's in the show notes and that's where all the information is going to go. But I will be giving my patrons like a week notice when applications open because I want to. And thank you, thank you, I love you. So a couple amazing opportunities and I hope that if you want to, you'll check those out in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Now on to the main event. My friends, I do not even need notes to record this episode. I'm just going to talk because I have talked about this a thousand times and I'm sure I will a thousand more. This comes as a request from my friend, jesse. Jesse always brings the fire with her podcast episode requests. I've taken several from her. Thank you, jesse. I'm not going to read her whole question because there's a lot of personal details in there and she can remain anonymous-ish. But she does correctly identify in her message to me that there's a big push-pull kind of globally in the world of performing arts and in aerial specifically, because it's such an uncodified industry about undercutting and are your rates high enough? Are they too high? Are they too low? And how dare you perform for free? And it can all get a bit culty. That's my word, not Jesse's.
Speaker 1:I have a lot of thoughts on this. So first allow me to validate you One. If you have been undercut and I'm sure that you have, I know I have it does not feel good, it sucks. I'm sorry that that's happened to you. It's also not your fault. It's also not going to be solved by talking shit about whoever's doing it and ostracizing them in passive, aggressive ways, which is what I see most of the time in very, very seldomly a conversation happening between these two people. That's because the conversation is going to be hell uncomfortable, and I get that. I truly do. I know because I've had that conversation many times. There's also been times where I was out on the conversation because I just didn't feel like trying to educate this person again, or whomever it was. So I've made both choices, but only one choice has actually yielded a positive income. A positive income, a positive outcome for me, and maybe a little bit of income, who knows?
Speaker 1:Validation number two your ability belongs to you. Your skill and your art belongs to you and you can do whatever you want with it because you have free will. There are times when it's perfectly appropriate and not harmful at all to perform for free or for very little, and I'll go into detail about that. In my opinion, can you do harm by performing for free or very little? Yes, yes, you can do harm for doing that. Does that mean every time you perform for free or for a low fee that you're harming someone? No, it doesn't mean that. It just means that it's possible. And the way to mitigate that is to know your community and to know your internal industry. If you feel confident that you are doing something in integrity, given what you know and having asked questions of those who have been in the industry longer than you, and you feel that they operate in integrity and you feel that your choices are in integrity, go forth and prosper.
Speaker 1:But I think the problem here is so seldom someone trying to be subversive and harmful and more often just a sense of wanting to do the right thing but perhaps not grasping the nuances that exist inside of an industry. The best way to educate yourself on the nuances of an industry is to be in it for a long period of time, which is going to include a lot of the school of hard knocks. The other way is by listening to people who have come before you and making your own judgment calls based on what you know about them. There's lots of people who have been doing this for a really long time who can give you wonderful advice and hold space for you and let you ask questions that you think are dumb. There are also people who are perfectly nice, people who have been doing this for a long time that will give you terrible advice, and perhaps this advice is informed by their own prejudices and insecurities. I don't know. I just know that we're all human and it happens, so asking more than one person is advisable. But yeah, it can get catty. It can get catty and it can get trash talky.
Speaker 1:So I want to offer you a framework, sort of a perspective for thinking about paying gigs within a community, because they are not all created equal and expecting them to be created equal is not going to serve you. Okay, so this framework that I'm talking about most performance opportunities and I'm talking about gig work here, not contract work. Contract work is when you work for Cirque du Soleil or you go on tour, you join a cabaret or some kind, and by cabaret I mean contract cabaret, the ones that are very popular in Germany, for example. I'm not talking about contract work, I'm talking about gig work, like you live in a city and you gig there. I have a feeling this episode's going to be longer than 20 minutes. Anyway, so three ways of looking at paid work or performance opportunities inside of a community.
Speaker 1:Tier number one community events. Community events are things put on by people that you probably know that exist for the sake of art. Pretty much. No one is making any money off of these events Local variety shows, local burlesque shows and other things of that nature sometimes put on by a local celebrity for the sake of the community, to bring the community together, to allow people to show new material on stage. These are community events, unless these are funded by an outside entity. There is little to no money because no one is making any money Not really. Maybe they're happening in the park behind your house, who knows?
Speaker 1:But this is an opportunity for you to work that you should not be expecting to make a significant paycheck from if you make one at all, because there's little to no funding there. Maybe you get a stipend, maybe you get paid in photos and videos which do have value, by the way, because you're likely going to either have to trade or pay someone else to do that for you and you do need those things. So if there's a cabaret that's happening I don't know a little place, it's been there for ages and they ask you to perform and they're like well, we can pay you a stipend of like 75 bucks and you'll get access to the video of your act and photos of your act. That would not be a time to explode in rage, because this is a community event. Fundraisers can, but do not always fall into this category. If it's someone you know who's putting it on however tangentially, and they're trying to raise money for a cause, they're probably putting their own money up to make the event happen, and if they ask for a donated performance, that would not be an appropriate time to fly into a rage. You are fully entitled to ask the questions. Ask the questions. It is not rude to ask an event organizer what the budget is. It's okay for you to ask questions.
Speaker 1:Okay, now number two regular ongoing events. These are typically weekly or monthly gigs in an established venue where someone is making money, generally the restaurant owner or the club owner. You're not there to try out new material. You're probably there to provide some kind of ambient aerial entertainment or something, and that is. There is an offering to the guest hoping that they'll come back because they saw someone cool doing cool stuff up in the ceiling. Fair point, it's very popular. It happens a lot in nightclubs and sometimes in cool restaurants.
Speaker 1:Now here's where I'm going to say that if something is happening with dependability for you and you have an opportunity, that happens weekly or even twice a week or once a month or every other week. That's a regular gig, and regular gigs get paid less than one-offs. If you're looking for a number here, a pretty common number is somewhere from two to three hundred per night, and that's usually for several ambient sets or several short acts. This and the rate for all things, is going to vary via location, so where you are located, your local market is likely to be different from other local markets. The market in San Francisco is not going to be exactly the same as the market in Tampa, and we'll come back to that in a moment.
Speaker 1:So a second ago I said, things that happen with regularity, like nightclub gigs, restaurant gigs, things that are regular and dependable, get paid less than one-offs, which brings us to the last in the three pieces of cake that we're deconstructing today, which are one-off corporate gigs or private events. These are parties hosted by Google and Facebook or that electrical company in your hometown. Also includes weddings and sometimes fundraisers. Yes, even for nonprofit organizations this is a private event and, unless it meets parameters, that makes you feel super comfortable that it's a community event or it is a cause that you dearly love and you want to donate your time, it gets charged at a private event fee. Now there are two ways of looking at one-off events and corporate events and private events. And yeah, if I didn't say it already and I'm pretty sure I did, but I'm going to repeat myself Weddings are included in this. Weddings are not a community event unless it's like your bestie and you feel good about doing that. If it's someone that you don't know, it's a private event.
Speaker 1:So two ways of looking at one-off events. Either someone hires you and that someone is an event organizer, a party planner, a wedding planner. They run a entertainment company that brings in a Cirque Style performance. So either you're getting hired by someone like that or you're speaking directly to the client. If you are being hired by an events organizer, then you will get an artist fee for your participation. An artist fee varies wildly by geographic location and market. This is why you can't just ask someone who lives across the world what a proper artist fee is. You need to talk to the people in your community if you don't know the answer to that, and not just one person. Talk to each other. I beg of you. Talk to each other.
Speaker 1:An artist fee is what you get paid to show up, do your thing, get a check and go home. So that's if someone else is hiring you. If you are talking directly to the client, that means you are self-producing. That means you will have to come up with the contracts, the invoicing, wrangle the other performers if there are any. You'll have to take care of costuming. You'll have to manage the event on the night of. You'll also have to negotiate with the client. Would you want to do all of those things for the same artist fee that you would get paid to just show up and do some aerial and go home? I hope not.
Speaker 1:If you are self-producing, which means you are talking to the person at Google, you are talking to the bride at the wedding, that is a self-produced gig which you are now in charge of, and getting an artist's fee by itself is not enough to pay you for all the extraordinary labor that goes into organizing an event. Quick back of the napkin math. Take your artist's fee and double it at least. If you're self-producing, a one-off gig. Take an artist's fee, something you'd be happy to get paid if someone else were hiring you. Who's going to do all this legwork and drudgery? Double it at least. Now.
Speaker 1:This is the most common misconception that I see up-and-coming emerging artists being confused about because they get hired by an events organizer several times and they get paid several hundred dollars. Let's just say five, Alright, I'm not going to say it's terrible, I'm not going to say it's wonderful, I'm just going to say it. In an artist's fee, for five hundred dollars, you show up, you do your thing, you get a check, you go home or you get a Venmo or something. They do that for like a year and then a client contacts them directly and says I want you to perform at my thing. They're like oh okay, I've done this before for five hundred dollars, so that's what I should charge, completely disregarding all the other work that they're gonna have to do, for no pay to be able to pull off this event. And that is how emerging artists who want, who are ambitious, who have drive, they are organized, they know they can do the thing and they start working. And then they start getting contacted directly by clients and they shoot themselves directly in the foot because they have failed to note the difference between getting hired by someone who already has systems in place and the overheads already covered, and they know how to contract the difference between doing that and doing it all by yourself.
Speaker 1:So those are the three kind of cakes. Let's say. I don't know why, maybe I'm hungry I keep calling it cakes, the three different kinds of cake as a gig life, hashtag, gig life working artists, community events, regular events and private, one-off events. There are others, of course, but those are the three things.
Speaker 1:So if, let's say, if you haven't developed an appreciation for the nuances between these three different kinds of cake and someone approaches you saying I'm having, I'm putting on a show, I'm funding it myself, it's gonna be down here at the local community theater, I'd love to have you perform. I'm trying to raise money to benefit such and such of a group of people or good cause or something, if you haven't yet developed an appreciation for the nuances between the kinds of cake, you might fail to see that the thing you're in being invited to do is a community event and you may present yourself as wanting to be paid for a one-off private event. You're gonna say something like $800, the organizer, who is just trying to raise some money for a private cause and is not making any money, is going to cry and you're going to be angry and feel like someone's trying to take advantage of you, when it's not necessarily true. The inverse of this could also be true. You could be invited to perform at a wedding and you think to yourself, oh, it's family gathering together, this must be a community event.
Speaker 1:So you give a community event rate, like I don't know $75 bucks in a drink ticket. Are people still doing that? I don't know. And then you show up and you notice that there's full catering, rented linens, rented silverware. If anyone listening has put on a wedding or helped to plan one, you may know that it's very easy to spend $900 on renting napkins.
Speaker 1:So if you have a hard time thinking I can't possibly be worth that much, it's like it's a lot of money. Are you worth as much as a napkin, are you? And this is not even a conversation of what you're worth? I don't even like that question what you're worth. There's no money could possibly pay for it. So this is not a question of charge what you're worth. It's a question of understanding the nuances between different kinds of opportunities.
Speaker 1:And here's a helpful hint If you find yourself having a really strong emotional reaction to a fee that's being proposed to you, that probably means that there is a greater depth of understanding that you could get to and I'm not saying you're wrong. It could be a totally insulting fee, but I just want you to understand that there is a lot of nuance between different kinds of opportunities and their times where it's appropriate to ask for more. There's times where it's appropriate for you to give your work away and donate it for free if you wish and if that's in integrity with your value system. The times when it is harmful is when an artist takes an opportunity that's a paying opportunity and does it for free, without understanding that that's what they're doing, because then the person who was paying the bills before isn't going to want to pay them again. So, like, oh, people do this for free because they just want to look cool. Like, oh shit.
Speaker 1:To further add to this nuanced state, there are performing opportunities where you pay to perform. This should only happen if you are a student. As a professional, you should not be paying to perform as a student. It can be totally appropriate if you've never done a performance before and your studio is holding a showcase and they're paying a fee or they're charging you a fee to help you organize an act, help you costume yourself, help you get your first experience in front of an audience. That's not wrong of them. That's paying to learn, and this is extremely common, like do you think my parents didn't fork over a small fortune to get me the training that I needed as a dancer and the many, many, many stages that I performed on as a young child and a very young woman? I paid to be on those stages and it gave me experience, going up for roles, learning them, getting to be lots of different things in lots of different ballets, because I was doing ballet at the time I wasn't a professional, I was in high school and, yeah, someone had to pay for that, and it was my parents. Thank you, mom and dad.
Speaker 1:So I think that an artist can really benefit by looking at where they are in their professional trajectory and recognizing if they can or cannot make an accurate judgment of that. Are they going to be overtaken by gremlins? Do they have a realistic view about where they are in their development? Because at the end of the day, my friends, it is up to us to decide what we charge and to know that there are different kinds of opportunities where different kinds of pay rates are going to be appropriate, and it's not a one size fits all situation at all, and I think it's really common to have a knee jerk reaction to whatever you hear. Someone is charging this for this particular opportunity and if you have a one size fits all view it's not a one size fits all view of pay rates for performing opportunities, you're going to be upset a lot, and I also think that it's important to note that your objective for yourself, for where you are in your development as an artist, is going to decide the kinds of opportunities that are a good fit for you.
Speaker 1:If where you are as an artist is that you want to get on stage as much as possible, you want the experience, you want to get in front of a live audience, you want to practice lots of different acts and play lots of different characters, that's one objective and it's a great objective. If what you want is to be on stage as much as possible, you're probably going to find lots of gigs that don't pay very much because there are more of those. On the other hand, if your objective is to make as much money as possible, like I want the money, I want the money nothing wrong with that either, totally valid you're probably going to work less because there are fewer high dollar, high quality leans than there are the other. So, to sum all of this up, let's go back to Jesse's original question. The very, very first question when is it okay to perform for free or at low cost? And the answer is of course, it depends.
Speaker 1:Questions that you can ask yourself to make this easier to approach. One is me doing this for free, taking a paid opportunity away from another artist. Question two is how I am trading my time and my skill in this exchange in integrity. And three, have I done the work to educate myself on my local industry and am I acting in integrity with my local community? So much nuance, so much more than 20 minutes in this episode.
Speaker 1:We're eking up on 26 here, so I'm going to climb down off my soapbox. I could continue going down this thread for a very long time, but I won't. I hope that you got something that you can use from this exchange. Thank you for being here and listening to me yammer on your ear while you fold laundry or drive to the dentist or whatever it is that you're doing. I appreciate each and every one of you so much for being here and for listening. If you have any questions, hit me up. I'm easy to find Instagram at Rachel Strickland Creative or Patreon at Rachel Strickland Creative. There are special smooches to my wonderful patrons, without whom this and so much would not exist. Thank you for standing by me. Go back to sleep.