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Last Saturday, 22 March 2025, I drove up to Hampstead, North Carolina to play a rare GigSalad booking. GigSalad is a website that connects performers of all types with those seeking their services, and GigSalad takes it’s cut (5% for free members, 2.5% for pro members). In the years that I have been using the service—admittedly, only intermittently—I’ve only booked two gigs through it. That’s not huge volume, but I look at it this way: those two gigs are money and experience I never would have had otherwise.
GigSalad users on the talent-buying end, in my experience, are not typically savvy to the unwritten rules and customs of booking talent. That’s not a problem—most people are not—and GigSalad is meant to smooth over that interaction, acting as a middleman to the exchange to protect both the talent and the buyer. But the service is rife with people looking for three-hour engagements with a budget of $100 or the like. In other words, the clientele tend to be a bit low-rent.
Yours portly isn’t exactly some high-class musician, but I know what my time and talent are worth, and I charge accordingly. My standard performance rate now is, depending on the client, $300 per performance hour. Note that, if someone books me to play one hour, there is about three hours of total commitment when factoring in travel, setup, teardown, etc. It’s more time if I have to travel a long distance. I also almost always play more than booked—I start playing before my official start time (if appropriate) and will often play beyond the official end time (again, if/when appropriate).
By “depending on the client,” I mean it depends on the type of client and the gig. Individuals are different than, say, large institutions. A large local hospital system in my area hires me for a couple of gigs a year; they have the budget to pay me $300 (and probably more) to play piano or noodle on the sax as background music for an hour. A local who needs sax for, say, background music for a small event might not get that same charge. But if it’s a wedding, the $300 rate applies.
That kind of conditional pricing my shock some buyers, but it’s just the way of things. Institutional buyers want to pay more (within reason), because if the price is too low, they begin to suspect the quality of the product. They’re also usually dealing with big entertainment budgets that need to be spent. Of course, we all know that anything related to weddings has a built-in markup.
But I digress. The issue is not the earnest local in need of some ambience or the large institution looking for the same. It’s usually the earnest local or out-of-towner who thinks it is reasonable to pay a musician $100 for providing hours of music.
Fortunately, that was not the situation last Saturday. I was booked to play sax for a small dinner party with a vaguely French theme. The talent buyer was extremely communicative and savvy, and after a few days of waiting for institutional approval (the event was attached to a large life insurance company), the deal was struck. Their upward budget was $300 for two hours of music, but I took it because a.) I needed the money and b.) I want to build up my reputation on GigSalad a bit. Also, c.) I missed playing out on the road.
I’m glad I took the slight price cut (again, these prices are not hard and fast); it was a very enjoyable evening, and that $300 booking will doubtlessly result in hundreds of more dollars going forward.
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The Portly Politico 