In this episode, Jared reflects on the quote “Wealth Denotes Speed” and how it radically shifted his approach to building a thriving music career. He shares the exact progression of how he raised his solo act rates—from $495 to $1,500+—and what that meant in terms of income, lifestyle, and gig volume. You’ll learn why your prices should start as “WAGs” (wild-ass guesses), how to tell when it’s time to raise your rates, and why understanding basic math could be the difference between gigging burnout and a six-figure music career. If you’ve ever wondered how to work less and earn more from your music, this is the blueprint.

"Most musicians are chasing $100 gigs and burning out. But if you play five $2,000 gigs a month, you’re at $100K a year—and actually have a life."

- 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.

I'm on a walk right now. It is beautiful. It is middle of July. I believe it's July 10th or so, whatever that Friday is. And it might be July 11th.

I tonight and tomorrow, my wife and I are staying at some hotels in downtown Denver for free that were provided to us by some gigs I played.

So this is kind of a side tangent to what I actually want to talk about this episode. But a while back, if you listened and binge my older episodes, you'll hear that I have sponsored a couple gigs that are like open house gigs or hotels.

And some of those are the two that we're staying at is the Rally Hotel. and then the second one is the Kimpton Claridge, which both of those are in Denver.

Claridge is a little bit outside, but they're very nice high-end hotels. And when I booked the room, it was 300 bucks a night, which is more than we normally pay for a room, but they're paid for for free because I sponsored these gigs.

And so I love doing these sponsored gigs, not just because I get free hotel rooms, But because the more important thing is it connects me with these big corporate planners who then see my music, hear me, and then put me on their preferred vendor list and then reach out to me, you know, a couple of weeks, couple of months later, say, Hey, I heard you at the rally hotel.

And I think you'd be awesome for our corporate celebration dinner.

Are you available? Which happens to me pretty frequently. and could happen to you too, if you do it. So it's pretty awesome. I'm excited for that.

Anyway, I wanted to chat specifically about a quote that I heard once, or not just once, but a couple times, from a guy named Myron Golden. Myron Golden is in the internet marketing space. He's kind of inside of Russell Brunson's circle.

And Russell's like my first guide and mentor. And I went through his coaching program to learn how to market and sell my music and apply that to my music, apply that to my business, and went really well.

And Myriah Golden has come and done some guest trainings every now and again. And one quote that I heard from him a couple times is wealth denotes speed. I'll say that again. Wealth denotes speed.

and so think about that. He said, if you want to make a million dollars, making a million dollars is actually not that hard because if you work a hundred thousand dollar a year job, then for 10 years you will make a million dollars.

But he said, you know, what if you wanted to make it faster? And then your, your job pays you $250,000 a year. Then it only takes four years instead of 10 years.

So you've basically halved the amount of time that it takes to make a million dollars. But what if you make $500,000 in a year? Then it only takes two years.

And so he said, truly, like wealth is not indicative of anything other than speed. Like how fast? can you make that kind of a money?

And see how this applies to me and extreme strings is that, you know, a couple months ago, I think it was either at the beginning of this year or, like, late last year, we crossed the hundred thousand dollar mark with our music.

And it took us about two and a half years to make that. And I can see, you know, we're now in July, being that I've raised my rates quite a bit since I started that, we're now at $133,000, which means that in just a couple months, we have done a third of $100,000, which is awesome.

And of course, you know, obviously I can't guarantee you'll see the same results, but I raised my rates when I first started extreme strings.

I was charging $495 per lesson, which was honestly more than I was personally making from when I played in my own string quartet up in Wisconsin. We would pull it in anywhere between 150 to 300 an hour or per gig.

But being that this, Extreme Streets is a solo act, it's like soloists have more responsibility than any individual band member.

And of course that's a gross generalization and I'll probably get some flak from that, but in general, a soloist has to is the one who brings their own sound equipment. Then they have to lead and carry the entire show.

You can't rely on anybody else but you. I think part of why I really like doing it that I, I like being reliable. I like being the one who bears sole responsibility of the success of the performance for the clients.

But anyway, more responsibility in my mind means higher pay. So started charging more. And so 495 was what we started at.

And if you do the math on that, 495, rounded up to 500 for simplicity's sake, in order to get to $100,000, with a $500 offer. That is 200 shows roughly. Let me do the math on that.

Because I'm not a math person. Yes. I am correct. It is 200 shows. in order to make $100,000. And so the quantity of shows that you do truly like is a function of time because for me, it would probably not be possible to do 200 shows in one single year.

I honestly just don't want to play every single day. I don't want to play every weekend. You know, my wife and I, I play two weekends.

And then we hang out two weekends so we can enjoy this beautiful Colorado that we've moved to. And so 200 shows in the year is not reasonable. But over time, I raised my rates from that initial $495.

And it's kind of funny in my coaching group, I get a lot of people who ask like, how do I come up with pricings?

And there's this one book that I read It's actually on how to sell software. And they said, like, your first attempts at pricing have to be wags. And the wag W-A-G stands for wild ass guess.

So you start with your first wag, which for me was 4.95. But then once you start making that offer to the public, because honestly, nobody can tell you what you should make your prices.

Except for the public who is willing to pay for it. And so you set your price as a wag, and if people are willing to pay for it, great, you got good feedback that your price was a reasonable price for them to pay.

However, if people keep saying yes to you in more quantities than you have capacity for, then that is indicative that you can raise your prices and see what happens.

So, you know, I started out at 4.95, raised it up to 7.50 very quickly as a soloist for one hour. Art is pretty cool. And that was my second wag. People kept saying yes. Great. Awesome.

Now, what happens when people keep saying yes? In degrees where you're booking more than you actually have capacity for. Again, it's time to raise prices.

So bumped it up another 250, which I did last year, and then started charging $1,000 minimum. And that was my third wag. And guess what? People kept saying yes.

And so you know what you do when people keep saying yes in quantities greater than you have capacity for? but you raise it again, 1250 became the new norm, and then 1500 is about where I'm at right now.

I do see that I'm probably going to go up to 2000 pretty soon. And you know what happens when you start charging $2,000 and your goal is to do $100,000? That means instead of 200 gigs, you get to $100,000.

That means only 50. gigs. And now we're actually in the range of making a hundred thousand dollars in a year.

Because as I mentioned, my wife and I, we tend to take two weekends and every month for ourselves, which means I'm gigging roughly two weekends every month.

And plus weekdays, I'm also gigging. So in order to do 50 gigs in a year, that would be, you know, 25 every other weekend. And that's, I'm sorry, not 25 every other weekend. That math didn't work out.

But so 50 in a year. So 50 divided by 12. Again, we're getting the calculator out for this because I am not a math person. 50 divided by 12. Equals 4.16 gigs a month.

So 4.16. Let's round that up to five just cuz you can't do 0.16 gigs in a month. So five gigs a month. And if I play one week two gigs and then a second week three gigs, that's all.

All I need to do, 100K a year with music. and so this math kind of stuff is really important and it all kind of circles back to that quote, wealth denotes speed.

You know, most musicians, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but most musicians are not making $100,000 a year with their musical performances.

You know, I'm not thinking about Taylor Swift, like, no, not, not that kind of musician, like the working class musician. the ones like you and me.

And a lot of musicians are chasing these gigs that pay them a hundred bucks a gig where they could be chasing $2,000 gigs as a soloist and multiply that by your bandmates.

If you're a five-piece, five-person band, that's a $10,000 gig. And that kind of changes the game for everybody because to make that kind of money, the music is incredible.

Now of course to get there, you, it, you need some skills that they don't typically teach musicians because just by being a better musician does not qualify you to charge $2,000.

I'm sure you're, you're welcome to just start charging $2,000 today, but odds are you don't necessarily have the leads attracted to your business in order to make like in order to make them a $2,000 offer or a $10,000 offer.

And so that really does require these business skills that we teach here on the podcast. And I teach in Fulltime Music Academy, like marketing and how to sell.

Like learning how to sell to these high end clients has been a game changer because it's no longer about like just pitching and pitching and pitching and hoping that they, this, you know, pick up when I'm laying down.

Now, it's not about pitching. It's about understanding truly their needs and getting them to admit they have those needs and helping them come to the conclusion, both the logical and the emotional conclusion, that you will help solve those needs.

And then from there, it's just a matter of signing the contract and putting the money down. So yeah, wealth denotes speed, and this is exactly how that plays out in our, our live music world.

So if you want some help going faster and charging more for your gigs and actually getting people to pay what you're worth, then just shout me out, hit me up. Go to fulltimemusicacademy.com/call.

I'd love to help you out personally on a Zoom call. It's totally free. And then if you're interested, we could chat about next steps, but there's no obligation to spend any money on this call. I just want to be helpful.

So that is all we have time for today. I hope that was helpful. To really see the shift, because especially if this world is going crazy, automation is taking lots of people's jobs and you know, live music cannot be replicated.

And so I feel like, honestly, in, you know, these discussions, I feel like live music is pretty safe, especially when you're playing people's corporate events or weddings or things like that.

Like that's not something people want. A robot band from Star Wars, I think. So let's, let's chat. Let's make it happen for you. And wealth denotes speed. That's all the time we have for today's episode.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.

Remember, "Your music will not market itself!" Bye everybody.