In this episode, Jared shares insights from his recent gig at Neiman Marcus, where he performed for their high-end clientele in the jewelry department. He dives into strategies for securing high-paying, recurring gigs and how to build meaningful relationships with event planners and clients. Jared also emphasizes the importance of crafting a modern and relevant repertoire to connect with today's audiences, offering advice on adjusting song lyrics and styles to appeal to premium clients. Learn how to boost your booking potential and position yourself as a top-tier artist in the music industry.

"When you focus on building relationships and modernizing your repertoire, you open doors to high-end gigs that treat you like an artist, not just a musician."

- 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 renegade Musicians? It's Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast where we focus on high end gigs. That way you get paid better and get treated better as a musician.

So I'm on my way home right now from my third, I think it's my third or fourth ever performance at Neiman Marcus, which is a department store nationwide, probably out of the country too. But I played at the Denver one for the third or fourth time today.

It's November 10, 2024. And I specifically playing for a private event they were having in their jewelry department where they invite their higher end clients and invite them in before the store even opened. Store opened at 11, the gig started at 9:30.

So they invited people to come in at 9:30 and shop their jewelry and have some mimosas and pastries and just some breakfast type stuff, which was pretty cool. And it's on. I was honored to definitely be asked to perform there a third time or fourth.

I can't count at this point. And it was a good gig. I will admit I was kind of tired and so I did not necessarily bring my A game, which I kind of don't like doing.

I really don't like phoning anything in. And I don't think I phoned this in exactly, but like I wasn't as animated as I normally was and even my hands felt a little bit more tired. You know, it's been kind of a rough, you know, couple, couple of weeks here and I played lots of gigs last week, been staying up late and I just, I need a vacation.

So the nice thing is Thanksgiving's coming up, so I'm going to Arizona to visit my family for Thanksgiving. But you know, that's not exactly a vacation. I need one where it's just me and my wife and just chill out, do nothing.

So I'm gonna try to plan that. Maybe I'll use some of that hotel credit that I got for sponsoring a gig at a hotel. A couple months ago I got like $750 worth of points for.

I think it was Hilton or Hyatt, one of those. So maybe I'll try to use those. Yeah, I basically played the same playlist that I've been playing for quite some time now, which includes a couple of today's hits like Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso and Chapel Roan's Pink Pony Club.

And that reminds me of a little sidebar that I had a conversation with one of my musicians in the Full time Music academy about making his repertoire modern and relev, because he's been kind of struggling a little bit. You know, he plays a similar repertoire that a lot of solo acoustic musicians play. You know, I can't name any songs off the top of my head because I'm still pretty tired.

But you probably would recognize him if you saw them. And I challenged him that if he wants to break into like weddings and other high end gigs, most of which are planned by younger millennial people, which the planners tend to skew female a little bit, then I would suggest that a wedding way to break into that a little bit is by shifting your repertoire to be a bit more modern. And the things that these planners are listening to on Spotify in their car or in their homes.

And I challenge this, my client, specifically to try to learn chapel roans, Pink Pony Club. And a while ago, I challenged everybody to do it. Actually one of our members in full time Music academy challenged everybody to record a video of them playing Pink Pony Club.

Turns out only me and her, the person who challenged everybody actually recorded it. And then I feel like that might be the reason, one of the reasons why we're breaking into high end gigs where others are not. Now when I talked to this older gentleman in my academy who plays acoustic guitar and sings to learn it, he had a few objections to it.

Some of them were based on the lyrics, which I totally understand. The song has lyrics that are not for everybody. But I'm not here to judge.

Right. I think like the best approach to businesses is one where you can actually, like, serve as many people as possible. Especially with music, we have to serve as many, as many people as possible.

Then we'll get lots of people giving us mucho de niro for our gigs. And so the lyrics, sure, they're questionable. And I play electric violin, so I don't have to worry about lyrics.

That's one of my favorite parts about this, is I can play music that has curse words and that talk about unsavory things. My electric electric violin. And nobody knows that I played music that talks about unsavory things or has curse words in it because it's all instrumental.

But this, this guy sings, so he has to contend with the lyrics. And so he, I asked him that, like, why not just kind of rewrite the song a little bit, change the lyrics. Especially in the age of ChatGPT, you could literally feed ChatGPT the lyrics to Pink Pony Club and then tell it the reasons why you can't sing this song and then ask it to come up with a version that would work for your voice, but keep close to the original structure so that the rhythm works and verses and choruses all work correctly.

And so he's like, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, I'll give it a shot. So I gave him a deadline, three days from when we talked about it, to go ahead and rewrite Pink Pony Club to work for his voice and work worldview.

And we'll see what happens. But yeah, I would argue, like, try to stay current, right? This is what people want to listen to. They don't necessarily want to listen to classic rock all the time or country all the time.

And that's okay. Like, that music is still really good. It's great music.

I have much admiration for the people who created it. And I still play it from time to time. I throw it into my playlist.

But I will say I try to keep the majority of my music current and relevant. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm getting booked fairly often. So see if you can apply that to what you're doing now.

Getting back to the Neiman Marcus gig, you know, it wasn't my best performance. I still did great. And one of the staff members of Neiman Marcus, she's the one who actually booked me.

And we were conversing beforehand. She came up to me after and she said, that was amazing. And she actually said to me, you are our preferred musician.

Which was really nice to hear. I think part of it's because my repertoire is so modern and current. But that's a sidebar.

But then she did say to me, is there any way that you could lower, like, is that budget that you give me flexible at all? Is there any way you could lower it a little bit? Because I actually blew our budget for this event. And inside I was like, laughing a little bit because I do charge a lot. And I'm proud to charge a lot because it lets me keep current.

I spend lots of money on music. I spend my time preparing for it. I spend money on good equipment.

And then most of the time I do what I consider to be a bang up job playing, playing some great music and performing well today being an exception to that, even though I think it still came across pretty. So she said that I. My budget, my.

The price I charged blew Neiman Marcus budget, which was hilarious. And asked if I was negotiable at all. And I said, yeah, since we're doing so many events together, I can come down in price.

You just let me know what budget you have for each event. And maybe we'll be flexible on how much time that gets or whatever. Like, you know, they're one of my repeat clients now and I wouldn't normally be negotiable for single one off event clients.

In fact, last month I actually lost a gig that was pretty close to signing the contract because I wasn't budging on my price for them because it was a wedding and they're not going to get married twice. Like this is one and done. That's one weekend that they don't want to pay my rates and therefore I don't want to show up.

And that's just how it goes. But Neiman Marcus now is a regular client. I think this past year I did four gigs for them, which is more than one.

And it sounds to me like there's going to be a bunch during the holiday season and then January and going forward because they. I'm their preferred musician according to the person I worked with. So yeah, that's like one of the few reasons where I am willing to budge on it is if it's going to be a recurring gig or if there's some sort of relationship building that I want to do that lowering the budget will enable me to do.

That's probably the big philosophy behind sponsoring events for the events industry. Like if there is a networking event for a bunch of corporate planners, I am willing to negotiate on my price all the way down to zero so that I could build a relationship with dozens of corporate planners all at the same time. To me that is a no brainer.

It's like I'm investing, you know, minimum of $750 for myself as a soloist. I'm investing $750 knowing that in return I will at least make that back by booking one gig from one corporate planner who will hear me now. If I book more than one gig, then I am profitable off of that one investment.

Even though there's no money changing hands for that first gig. It's just me volunteering my musical services. So I think a lot of people get skittish about building relations and about doing music business things that are not like performing or practicing or networking with other musicians.

And I don't think I've. Oh, that's not true. I was, I was about to say I don't think I've networked with any musicians here in Colorado.

No, I've probably networked with about 10 or so musicians here in Colorado in the last two years because yeah, it is valuable and like I need substitutes for this act that I'M booking fairly often and I also want to expand to other, you know, not just high end gigs, but sometimes I want to play some artistic gigs which I've been doing a little bit lately, which has been pretty fun.

However, if you want to make substantial amounts of money off of your music in a relatively short amount of time, those aren't really the way to do it. To me, in my experience, it's, it's the high end gigs, it's playing Neiman Marcus, it's playing somebody's wedding, it's playing a corporate event and so forth.

All right, and then one, one last thing. Here's like a quick update on what I'm doing next week as far as my musicianship is concerned because yeah, I'm still planting gig seeds and harvesting my gig crops next week on, I think Tuesday, I'm going to be playing the Slate Hotel gig. I still have to confirm that I had to actually switch that from Thursday because on Thursday I've got two gigs.

One in the morning, one in the evening. Both of them are sponsored gigs. The morning gig is for a non profit here in Colorado called Serving Up Hope.

Actually that's the name of the event, but it's hosted by the Meeting Industry Council of Colorado. And basically it's a big charity event hosted by all these corporate event planners and everybody in the events industry. And I'm sponsoring it while they're doing their little donation or whatever, whatever they do at this thing just to get that like exposure.

Hey, Jared from Extreme Strings is awesome. We should hire him for our next event at whatever. So that's the morning and then in the evening I am sponsoring a gig hosted by a destination management company at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Denver, which is actually going to be attended by governors from across the country.

So I'm excited to play for that. I've played for a bunch of governors in Wisconsin and I played for a governor in Colorado too. But now I'm going to play for like hopefully all 50 governors all at the same time, which would be really cool.

So I'm excited for that. A nice bipartisan event where there's no political charge ness. It's just everybody getting together and enjoying my music.

And hopefully I get to use my music to bring people together even more, which makes me happy. All right. So that's what I've got up to today.

Today, by the way, all of these opportunities, like, and the coaching that goes along with it are available inside of BookLive. I don't know if I mentioned this, but every Friday, all BookLive members get a free one hour coaching session on Zoom. You know it's free Friday noon at Eastern Time.

So if you're a BookLive member, there's a Zoom link inside of your BookLive dashboard. On the top right underneath the green room heading, it says Free Zoom Coaching Session. And then if you click on that and it's the right time, it'll bring you right into that Zoom Room where we could talk about this.

I could help you find these kinds of opportunities in your area. So get your free BookLive trial. It's open to all members of BookLive.

Even if you're still on the free trial, just go there and then go into the green room and click Free Coaching Session. So go to BookLive.com to get your free trial and hopefully I will see you in one of our upcoming coaching sessions.

So thanks for tuning into another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "Your music will not market itself!". Take care everybody.

Bye.