In this episode, Jared shares his latest success stories, including how he landed two of the highest-paid solo gigs of his career, including a $3,000 gig in Austin and a lucrative festival in Colorado. He dives into his booking strategies, gigging experiences, and how networking with event planners has propelled his career forward. Jared also discusses his game plan for securing holiday party gigs and reaching the six-figure milestone with Extreme Strings.

"For the first time, I’m finally being treated like an artist, not just a gigging musician—and that’s an amazing feeling."

- BookLive: Everything you need to start marketing and booking your act online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)​
- Your First Gig: Everything you need to book your first high-paying gig.
- Fulltime Music Masterclass: The Secret To an Unlimited Stream of High-Paying Private Event Gigs …Without Spending a Fortune on Online Advertising or Having Any Connections!
- Fulltime Music Academy (Gig Vault): 24,665 High-End Venues + Event Planners: Use this directory to book your highest-paid gig to-date.
- Breaking Into High-end Gigs Masterclass: How I Went From Broke Musician to Thriving By Breaking Into These Largely Unknown High-Paying Gigs

What's up Gigging musicians? It's Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.

It has been a while. Right now, we're kind of publishing a lot of episodes that have been in the queue for a while that just haven't been published.

So, yeah, this is probably the first one in a month or so. So I've been in my house for about a month and a half now and been doing lots of gigs.

And my brother in law's wedding is coming up this weekend. So my good buddy from Milwaukee, he's on a tour through Colorado right now. He is actually going to be playing for that wedding, which I'm super excited.

And he got a nice wedding gig out of that. Of course, he's being paid well. I don't know.

I think this episode is going to be kind of short because I'm on my way back from my Slate Hotel gig. I got this hotel gig that I play every other week, and they've been super flexible about me moving the dates on them.

They were supposed to be on Thursdays, but I think I have only played one Thursday out of the four or five times I've been there so far.

And they've just been super understanding because usually I've had, like, a gig that night that I just couldn't move, like a corporate event or a long standing Tea Babe's Tea Room gig before then.

But that's kind of not really the point of today's podcast. I want to share with you that I have recently booked two of the highest paid solo gigs of my life since, you know, some of the last episodes that I've recorded.

And I'm super excited about it. And I feel like, you know, for the first time, maybe ever, I've. I'm finally being treated like an artist instead of just a gigging musician, which is super cool.

So the first gig, I kind of hinted at this a while ago, but I don't think I was able to make it official until the ink actually dried. And that happened last week or so. But I am officially booked to perform in Austin, Texas.

There is a high-end shopping center that is hosting a museum on the moon, inflatable pop up art gallery. That's a big inflatable moon. You may have seen this.

It's been on tour in a lot of cities across the world, and they're bringing it down to Austin, and they wanted to do a kickoff event slash concert for it.

And they said that they wanted to hire a rock orchestra in Austin, but they couldn't find one in Austin. And so they did a bunch of Googling and Instagram searching and they found me and they said, hey, we want to bring you down.

We want to fly you down. We'll pay for flights, hotels, get you meals. And then artist budget is like three K, which is pretty awesome.

I've never been compensated that much as a soloist for an hour and a half of performing. So what is that, like a $2,000 an hour salary? I cannot complain about that one bit.

Now, it did require me to move this late hotel gig from the intended when that I was actually was supposed to be Thursday, but I moved it to Wednesday.

And then I had to reschedule it now to another Wednesday, the following week, October 30, because this gig is happening October 24, and I'm flying on the 23rd, which is when the slate gig was supposed to happen. So they've been so accommodating. I appreciate them.

And that hotel gig is super fun. It's 3 hours. It's basically a bar gig.

And then I'm getting paid 250 for that, plus tips. And today I made a lot of tips. Like a lot of people dropped twenties in my tip jar, which I'm not really using a tip jar.

I'm just kind of. There's a ledge right near me that I put my Venmo thing and I put a five dollar bill out. And then people just put their $20 and $10 next to it.

It's pretty cool. And then at the end of the gig, they have a kitchen. And so I get the burger and it is so good.

Burger and fries. Can't beat it. Alright, so that is high end gig number one, Austin.

And then. Then the second gig is actually November 1, second and third. It's three dates, half hour performances for the first two days and then a 45 minutes set for the third day.

And that is a festival. It is a new festival in Aurora, Colorado, which a while ago I had performed for their launch party for this festival. It's called the Aurora Borealis Festival.

And the way that I got the launch party gig was through a corporate event planner that I had networked with at one of the networking events for event planners.

That's why I do these things and why I'm so adamant about it. And I've been so consistent about recommending you do it if you want to get paid well as a musician.

So I got this launch party. It was over a year ago. I think it was October of last year.

And it was. They invited a lot of press and media and they did a big presentation launching this Aurora Borealis festival. And then I saw a Facebook ad.

It was a call for artists for this festival and I hadn't heard anything from this festival.

So what I decided to do is I decided to click on the Facebook ad and then fill out the Google form application for this festival.

And I filled it out with all my standard stuff like Instagram and YouTube links and a description of what my act is.

And then I chased down the email address of the person in charge of this festival because they're actually affiliated with the Aurora tourism board.

So I chased down their email address and just sent them a quick note saying, hey, I just applied for the festival and I was the violinist who played the launch party.

So I kind of like a, you know, wish me luck kind of thing.

And I think it worked because then I got offered the three dates of the festival for $2,500 total, which is pretty good. So it's going to be a pretty lucrative October and November for me. Then I gotta fill my December with some holiday party gigs.

I don't think I have any on the books yet. So if you don't have any on the books yet, you are not too late. You're not alone.

There is still plenty of time for that to happen. So just have patience and be persistent.

And I have not done any marketing for holiday parties, so I think that's kind of gonna go on my to do list after my brother in law's wedding on Sunday, start to shake the trees for holiday party gigs.

Which also means I'm gonna probably record a couple holiday tunes. You know, I'm the electric violinist with backing tracks, so I'm gonna record some holiday holiday tunes.
But I already have, like the standard, you know, Bing Crosby Christmas songs.

I have those recorded, but I found recently a Christmas album by an electronic dance music artist named Kaskade. That's k a S k a d e, which I'm actually gonna see him live at the end of October. I'm super excited.

But he made a Christmas album a couple years ago that is super interesting. It's like very artsy and it's not super. I don't know, it's not the warm and fuzzies that you typically hear with Christmas music, but it is very artistic and I think it's so interesting.

I played it at some Christmas and July events this past July and August and it was a huge hit. So I'm gonna record those, put those out on YouTube, and then send some emails to event planners with those new albums.

Plus I'm gonna continue emailing them, inviting them to my public showcase gigs, which is the slate hotel and the babes tea room gigs.

So I got this kind of marketing engine that it's working pretty well because I'm getting these higher end gigs, but I need more of those high end gigs.

So that's the challenge is let's keep getting some of these several thousand dollar gigs and yeah, it'll be a good time. Just as a quick update, I am at with extreme strings since I launched it two years ago.

We are $73,000 of sales so far that's booked gigs. And you know, I always want to be very clear. I cannot guarantee that you will have the same results as me.

I can't guarantee that you will make a single dollar pursuing these methods. But these are the methods that I'm using to grow extreme strings. And we're at 73,000 for the past two years, which roughly averages to year.

Although this year was a lot higher than last year, just because momentum and reputation and it's definitely building.

But what that means is I am $27,000 away from the major 6th award, which I've been pursuing that the major 6th award is the gold record that we give out for people who book six figures of gigs using the BookLive software. So I'm in hot pursuit of that.

And I'm only like 27 gigs away from doing that. Assuming that I book each gig for at least a $1,000, which I think is totally doable by, I'm gonna say march of next year. So that's me calling my shot and hopefully I achieve or exceed that goal.

I've got five months to make that happen, so wish me luck. And that's all I got for y'all today. By the way, if you would like to get a free trial of the BookLive software, go to BookLive.com.

and there's a free sign up button where you can give it a shot for 30 days and see how it measures and tracks your progress towards the major 6th club. And let me know what you think. Alright, that's all I got for y'all today.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "Your music will not market itself!". Adios.