# So just how much does the average rock star earn? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 3, 2006, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776 "2006-02-03T02:40:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![An\_Arky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/87869e/32.png) [@An\_Arky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Arky)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2006, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/21 "2006-02-03T20:34:05Z")
Anecdotal from a long time ago: I was talking to Mike Mills of REM at the Antenna Club in Memphis in 1987. Curious, I asked him how much he was pulling down (this was before they signed with Warners for bajillions). He said they each got $50K salary, plus per diem, not including royalties, merchandising, etc. They credited songwriting to all four members back then, so that was equal for each member. ---
**Author:** ![shelbo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3d9bf3/32.png) [@shelbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shelbo)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2006, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/22 "2006-02-03T22:17:33Z")
> [@An Arky](#): > > Anecdotal from a long time ago: > I was talking to Mike Mills of REM at the Antenna Club in Memphis in 1987. Curious, I asked him how much he was pulling down (this was before they signed with Warners for bajillions). He said they each got $50K salary, plus per diem, not including royalties, merchandising, etc. They credited songwriting to all four members back then, so that was equal for each member. [Here’s an interesting article by Courtney Love on the state of rock star economics.](http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html) In the example she uses, the bidding-war band sells a million copies of their hit record, and gets about $45,000 each for the year. ---
**Author:** ![KAndre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@KAndre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KAndre)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2006, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/23 "2006-02-03T22:20:54Z")
An acquaintance of mine attended the Billboard Road Work 2005 Touring Conference, which I believed was attended mostly by promoters, agents and managers. The gist of what she explained to me was that the band or group generally negotiated a guarantee as opposed to a back end sales percentage (but these were people like CCE and The House of Blues) so more of the financial risk was on the venue promoter. I also got the impression that bands made most of their money of touring because they only got a small percentage of CD sales and few CDs currently go gold, much less platinum. What exactly would be considered an average rock star? Someone who makes the Billboard Hot 100 or 200 or whatever? A band that has enough regular gigs that they don’t have to work a second job? ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2006, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/24 "2006-02-03T23:54:44Z")
> [@Birdmonster](#): > > Being the shameless self-promoter that I am, our name is Birdmonster. And I appreciate the good luck. Great books on the subject, by the way, are “Mansion on the Hill” (the story of the beginnings of the record industry and the strangness that is Bruce Springsteen) and “Hit Men” (a brief, albeit is a bit dated, history of payola) Know both of those books and found them very educational. My buddy the record producer also recommends “Confessions of a Record Producer” which I haven’t read but apparently goes into more detail about contract structures… I’ll keep an eye out for your band. Any obvious place to hear your stuff? ---
**Author:** ![Birdmonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/71e660/32.png) [@Birdmonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Birdmonster)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2006, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/25 "2006-02-04T00:27:40Z")
Obvious places include myspace (search birdmonster) and [birdmonster.com](http://birdmonster.com). Or, maybe you live in the bay area. We play there constantly. We’ll be touring around & I’m gonna try & meet a real life doper when I do. It’s my goal to actually connect the SDMB to live humans on just one night in March or this summer. It’s gonna happen, I swear. ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2006, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/26 "2006-02-04T01:12:02Z")
> [@Birdmonster](#): > > Obvious places include myspace (search birdmonster) and [birdmonster.com](http://birdmonster.com). Or, maybe you live in the bay area. We play there constantly. We’ll be touring around & I’m gonna try & meet a real life doper when I do. It’s my goal to actually connect the SDMB to live humans on just one night in March or this summer. It’s gonna happen, I swear. I lived my whole life in the Bay Area - Redwood City and SF - before relocating to NY a few years ago, so can’t catch you live. I will check out myspace… ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2006, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/27 "2006-02-04T02:17:27Z")
> [@Birdmonster](#): > > My band & I are in the middle of negotiations with both a major & indie & are thinking of dismissing them both for a self-released thing. As noted above, the contracts usually offered to young bands are, well, atrocious, where the masters and publishing are sold for fractions of what they’re worth. Basically, a band without much clout to negotiate with can expect to make about 85 CENTS per CD, and, if they have a manager, he’s probably getting a dime outta that. Maybe their producer has a point too. At any rate, let’s be generous and say that the band gets 80 cents. There are four members. You’re looking at 20 cents each, per CD. > > Whoopie. > > Thank Jesus for the Internet though. It’s now possible to get a decent national presence through online magazines, blogs, and downloadable songs, a presence impossible without extensive touring or label support in the past. In other words, the necessity of selling your rights or your soul are much lower now, and, with patience, well, I think it’s possible. We’ll see. > > To answer the OP, it’s hard to peg exactly how much a band makes for a hit. Pushing a single through the radio in the states takes hundreds of thousands of dollars of “independent promotion” (read: bribery) and the band is sometimes left to recoup the cost. If this translates into larger shows, a nice soundtrack, or big CD sales, well, then they’re probably doing alright. If it doesn’t, they’d better get used to renting apartments for quite some time. Selling out big venues (stadium sized) is a luxury available to maybe 100 artists of all genres and, like any industry, the most successful 1% can be knee-deep in hookers and blow, if that’s their thing. And, hey, who doesn’t want blow & hookers? 20 cents wouldn’t be bad, IF you kept all that money. Sell 500,000 CD’s, and you’ll make $100K each. And I don’t know what your contract looked like, but often the ‘gotchas’ are in the details. For example, you have to tour to support the CD. So the record label fronts you some money for expenses. Then there’s the production costs, perhaps some other fees thrown in the mix. So you tour for six months, sell 100,000 CDs, and the record label says, "okay, 100,000 CD’s. That’s $80,000 for the band. Minus the $25,000 we fronted for the touring, plus the 15% interest on that money over the past six months. And of course, studio time came to $10,000, and the CD needed more production than we thought, so we had to go back and pay another $5,000 (never mind that they own the studios and the producer is an employee, so they’re charging themselves, and giving you the bill). Then there’s lawyer fees, agent fees, document prep, blah blah blah. In the end, the band gets $40,000, splits it four ways, and you all made less than minimum wage. Maybe your contract was better, but I’ve heard of some that were so stacked that the band essentially had to become that 1 in a thousand monster act before anyone made a reasonable living wage. If you were anything less, you essentially just became a low-paid marketing vehicle for a record company, selling your own songs for them. ---
**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2006, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/28 "2006-02-10T14:06:52Z")
> [@Superdude](#): > > I’ll withdraw that. I never had any interaction with him, but thought I heard someone say that he WAS in the band. No, he was in the Five Americans. Their biggest hit was “Western Union”. ---
**Author:** ![Birdmonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/71e660/32.png) [@Birdmonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Birdmonster)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2006, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/29 "2006-02-10T16:33:50Z")
> [@Sam Stone](#): > > 20 cents wouldn’t be bad, IF you kept all that money. Sell 500,000 CD’s, and you’ll make $100K each. And I don’t know what your contract looked like, but often the ‘gotchas’ are in the details. For example, you have to tour to support the CD. So the record label fronts you some money for expenses. Then there’s the production costs, perhaps some other fees thrown in the mix. So you tour for six months, sell 100,000 CDs, and the record label says, "okay, 100,000 CD’s. That’s $80,000 for the band. Minus the $25,000 we fronted for the touring, plus the 15% interest on that money over the past six months. And of course, studio time came to $10,000, and the CD needed more production than we thought, so we had to go back and pay another $5,000 (never mind that they own the studios and the producer is an employee, so they’re charging themselves, and giving you the bill). Then there’s lawyer fees, agent fees, document prep, blah blah blah. In the end, the band gets $40,000, splits it four ways, and you all made less than minimum wage. > > Maybe your contract was better, but I’ve heard of some that were so stacked that the band essentially had to become that 1 in a thousand monster act before anyone made a reasonable living wage. If you were anything less, you essentially just became a low-paid marketing vehicle for a record company, selling your own songs for them. All the supremely ridiculous bullshit is fairly common practice when getting offered a contract. The one we got fronted from a major was chock full of stuff like that. The added catch is that they’ll usually set a sales goal for a band (a practice that wasn’t really used back in the heyday of big label music) and if that goal isn’t met, the band is no longer promoted aggressively, given good tours, etc., thus basically freezing their capability to progress. Or, say the A&R person who’s working for you quits or is fired (which is happening over & over since the majors are tanking right now)—well, you’re pretty much fucked there too, because no one’s going to take up the reigns, unless you’ve already established yourselves as a moneymaking venture. And, since odds are they’ve trapped the band in a 5 to 7 album deal (as options, not guarantees), they can just refuse to excercise their option on the second album and, if you signed something especially awful, they might even own the band’s name, making it pretty impossible to continue a career that you’ve been honing & cultivating for several years. Dropped bands are often seen as damaged goods, so, you’re pretty much on your own if that happens. All in all, not a happy situation. Sorry for the hijack… ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2006, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/30 "2006-02-10T18:43:13Z")
Or you could have something happen like what happened to Wilco. Despite being a very popular alternative band, they made a CD for a record company, and the record company simply refused to release it, because it wasn’t ‘commercial’ enough. So the band had to dig into their own pockets and come up with, I believe, $40,000 to buy their CD back frorm the record label. The irony is that that CD was _Yankee Hotel Foxtrot_, which they then put on their web site for free. The CD was so good that the internet began buzzing about it, and another division of the same record label wound up buying the CD back from the band for twice what the band originally paid. Stupid record companies. That CD went on to become their biggest seller ever, and it’s now considered a modern classic. It also disproved the notion that music downloads were necessarily bad for CD sales, because YHF was all over Napster and other P2P services long before the CD was even released. All the hardcore Wilco fans already had it. And yet, they all went out and bought the CD, and the word of mouth generated by all the people listening to the CD created legions of new fans. It’s no wonder more and more bands are moving to independent labels, or starting their own labels, or just promoting their CDs on the web and relying on word of mouth. ---
**Author:** ![Birdmonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/71e660/32.png) [@Birdmonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Birdmonster)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2006, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/31 "2006-02-10T19:01:51Z")
> [@Sam Stone](#): > > It’s no wonder more and more bands are moving to independent labels, or starting their own labels, or just promoting their CDs on the web and relying on word of mouth. I was having a talk with a career musician a few weeks ago and he summed it up nicely. He was on a little indie label for 6 years, making ends meet, playing music for a living, being rejected by the major label thing as he kinda had a Ted Nugent (in music, not personality) thing going. Anyway, when he started selling out 500 person clubs, all of the sudden, the majors “get it.” “We understand what you’re doing now,” they say, “we want to sign you.” His response: “Fuck you.” The reason he said this was basically this: “On that indie, I put food on their family’s tables. There were 5 bands and they loved us all and worked their asses off. They couldn’t afford to push one by the wayside or half ass it. I paid their mortgage.” I thought it was pretty insightful. God bless the internet. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2006, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/32 "2006-02-10T19:02:40Z")
Does anybody else see the term “the average rock star” as an oxymoron? :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![Birdmonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/71e660/32.png) [@Birdmonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Birdmonster)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2006, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/33 "2006-02-10T19:06:34Z")
“Rock star” is a phrase nearly as overused as “diva.” ---
**Author:** ![DMark](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@DMark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMark)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2006, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/34 "2006-02-10T22:48:13Z")
A couple of years back there was an interesting segment on some entertainment cable show about this subject. The upswing was that the CD’s didn’t really bring in much money for the performers (unless, as mentioned, you wrote the song and got royalties on top of sales). They said the real money was in concerts, and that concerts also helped sell CD’s, thus a lot a relatively famous groups and singers were constantly on the road - not because they liked staying in Holiday Inn’s all over the country, but because that was the only way they could make any real money. Some female singer was interviewed (Bonnie Raitt or someone like her?) and she said she made 95% of her income from touring and percentage of the gate, vs a small income from sales of her records. And living here in Las Vegas, we have Celine Dion, Elton John and Barry Manilow all doing long-term concert gigs here. Say what you want about their talents (or lack of) but they each have dozens of CD’s on the market. Do you think any of them would do this night after night if they weren’t in in for the money? ---
**Author:** ![Birdmonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/71e660/32.png) [@Birdmonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Birdmonster)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2006, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776/35 "2006-02-10T23:22:54Z")
> [@DMark](#): > > And living here in Las Vegas, we have Celine Dion, Elton John and Barry Manilow all doing long-term concert gigs here. Say what you want about their talents (or lack of) but they each have dozens of CD’s on the market. Do you think any of them would do this night after night if they weren’t in in for the money? You’d hope they would. Any musician who won’t play live, day in day out, ain’t worth their weight in salt. That’s my two cents, anyway. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-just-how-much-does-the-average-rock-star-earn/342776.md?page=1)