In this episode, Jared shares the surprising story of how his lowest-paid, most frustrating gig became the unexpected gateway to a high-paying corporate performance. From chaotic load-ins to venue staff indifference, you'll hear how perseverance and professionalism—even at your worst gigs—can pay off in ways you’d never expect.

"The lowest paying gig I ever said yes to led to one of the highest paying gigs I’ve ever gotten"

- 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.

And it's been a while. It's been a very busy gigging season, playing lots of weddings and corporate events. That's mainly what I do. And it's been super fun, but super busy.

Even though my wife and I have decided on doing alternating weekends. So two gigging weekends a month, the rest of them, so fun. Still been super busy.

Yeah, the, the gigging weekends, I just kind of been stacking those on basically like two or three, maybe even four gigs per weekend, depending on if I could fit two weddings in a day.

Last weekend I was in the mountains quite a bit. I posted to our Facebook group Business Tips for giving Gigging musicians a six minute walkthrough video of one of my mountain gigs.

It was at Copper Mountain here in Colorado and it was a wedding that they hosted at the very top of the mountain. So beautiful.

But also one of the most complicated load ins I've ever had to deal with is I was doing ceremony music and cocktail hour music, which I always say if you're a bar musician, you will love playing cocktail hour because it's basically a bar gig, but can pay 10 times as much as your local watering hole pays.

But yeah, so I was doing two different gigs in that gig, ceremony, cocktail, or two different spaces. So I just have two PA systems. And then to add to that, it's at the top of a mountain.

And in this particular ski resort, you cannot drive to the top of the mountain. You have to take a gondola, which meant loading two PA systems and my instruments and everything else that I needed into a gondola that those gondolas, they don't stop. I mean, they can make them stop, but they are not happy about it.

So they wound up. I actually had a ski resort staff member help me load into the gondola at the bottom and then a different one helped me load out at the top.

And they slowed the gondola down, but it was still moving the entire time. And if you don't take out one of your speakers by the time the gondola gets to the end of the sidewalk, then it's taken off without you and go back down. Luckily, that did not happen to me. So I had all my PA system, but it was still huge pain.

And then even at the top of the mountain, you know, it's a ski resort, it's at elevation. I don't know exactly the elevation, but it felt like maybe 10,000ft.

Up for conference. For reference, Denver is considered the mile high city. On average, we're a mile above sea level. And in fact, if you look at the Rockies baseball stadium, there is a row of seats in the upper deck that is purple where the other ones are all green.

And that purple indicates 5,280ft above sea level, which is pretty cool. But then Copper mountain, at least 10,000 above sea level. And when you're at that altitude, it's harder to breathe.

If any of you ever, ever been up this way, you know what I'm talking about. If not, hit me up. Let's take a hike. It'll be super fun and you'll be out of breath. And so, yeah, that was, it was a fun gig.

Very complicated setup, but all good. Anyway, I am constantly on a mission to help you guys raise your rates and just increase your earnings from live music, specifically because I know that so many of you, you know, you've been trying, you've been doing this music game for a while and maybe you do some bar gigs and you know that bars and restaurants are never going to raise their budgets because they don't have the money.

You know, so many bars and restaurants go out of business so often and you know, hiring live musicians is a risk.

They're banking on you to help them make more money, which already puts us in an adversarial position that we don't want to be in, because I don't want to be in a position of helping a bar and restaurant make more money.

I want to play music. Right? And so that's why these private events are just so incredible, because you don't have to help them make money.

You just have to do what you do best and give them some great entertainment that them and them, their guests love and remember forever. And so I apply the same stringent advice to myself what I do to you.

And I'm happy to announce that I have booked my highest paying local gig, meaning pretty much no travel except for drive in the car by booking a $3,000 solo show for three hours of playing, which makes my hourly rate at this point, a thousand dollars an hour, which is super cool.

I'll tell you a little bit about this. This gig. This is going to be a wedding rehearsal dinner. Actually, it's a welcome party, not a rehearsal dinner is they're not really doing a wedding party in the sense of like bridesmaids and groomsmen.

It's just gonna be them. And so this welcome dinner is to welcome all the out of town guests and I was contacted by the mother of the groom.

And by the way, rehearsal dinners, welcome parties, they're just like bar gigs. So if you're like, I can't do private events. Well, if you've ever done a real like bar, bar gig or restaurant gig, we're listening actually in a restaurant.

And I'm not making any speeches or announcements. I'm not timing my music to anything. It's just three hours of music with a couple breaks.

Anyone ever do that before? And if so, you can totally do these private events. So yeah, mother of the groom found me. I believe she found me on Google. And you know, one of my.

The big parts of my strategy is I don't really do negotiation over email or over the messages inside of those platforms, gigs out the bash, whatever.

Because I believe if you do your negotiation over text, you're setting yourself up to lose because you lose your leverage, you lose your power.

And these people, being that it's over the Internet or over text, they don't really see you as the full human being that you are, and it's easier for them to undervalue you.

And so I require a zoom meeting or at the very least a phone call, do these kinds of negotiation sessions, which wasn't even a negotiation. I record all of my calls too. Super helpful.

Because, you know, these calls leverage our sales abilities. And the only way to get better at a skill is by practicing it and then by listening back to what you're doing to have an honest assessment of your performance.

Sound familiar? Kind of like the way that we learn and practice music. So, yeah, this mother of the groom in the call, I asked her, you know, like, how did you find me?

And she told me a fun story that maybe will help you understand how these people make their decisions as far as hiring Latin music. She said their family went on a vacation to Cancun several years ago.

And they said that the thing that they remembered most about their vacation in Cancun was an electric violinist. And she even said, not the food.

You know, we did a 12 course tasting menu, but none of us really remember how the food tasted, but we all remember the electric violinist and how that made the memories for us.

And so she was put in charge of the entertainment aspect of their welcome dinner. And she said, I wonder if there are any electric violins in Colorado.

And that's when she Google searched electric violinist in Colorado and found little old me. And based on, you know, she found my website or she must have found something.

I think she did find my website because then she Referenced like, I watched your videos. So she saw my performances.

But then she mentioned she also watched a video where I was talking to the camera, kind of delivering a PowerPoint presentation on what it's like to hire me.

Called that a video sales letter. And she said it was super helpful. And that's actually when she said, you're absolutely right. Because in the video sales letter. Hang on, I gotta sneeze.

All right, I am done sneezing. Didn't want you guys to have to hear that. So she said in the video sales letter, that's where I mentioned specifically when people think about the things about their wedding that they remember, it's not really the food or the decorations or things like that.

It's really mostly the entertainment. And so she referenced my video sales letter. It's always super helpful to know that my marketing is working.

And then we got down to it and she's like, yeah, we're interested in having you for three hours if it works out the budget and gotta get the kids to sign off, meaning the bride and groom, because she's the mother of the groom.

And so I, it's funny cuz I recently was telling my, my group that I coach, like, you know, I charge a minimum of 1500 for an hour to get started.

And then each additional hour is like something super cheap. Makes me have been an hour. And I was saying to them, I want to raise my rates. Like I feel like I'm, I'm still not charging what I believe I can make.

And so she starts to say, you know, let's talk about budget and things like that. And then she didn't even ask me what, what I charge. She asked.

She said, I assume something like you cost about a thousand an hour and if you do the math on that, that's like three hours, $3,000.

Whereas if I were to charge what I was going to charge, which was 1500 for the first hour and 500 for each additional hour, I would have charged 2,500.

And I would have been happy with 2,500 because that's still, you know, within a pretty high end rate for a soloist. But she said 3,000, like 10,000 an hour. And I just, I didn't even say 2,500. I. She said, yep, that's about it.

And she's like, okay, that's what I expected. And then she said, let me just go and get everybody's approval. And so I sent her the contract and I sent her, you know, that I set it up in BookLive with my $3,000 rate.

And then the contract just had some basic terms, date, time, venue, pay, all that good stuff. And she said, okay, I'm going to take this to my husband and the kids and you know, you should hear from us within a couple days. And I'm not a very high pressure salesperson on these calls.

Like I don't need them to necessarily book me right on the call because especially with these weddings, you know, they oftentimes do need time to think about it.

And so said, okay, sounds good, we'll touch base in a day or two. And then within like an hour or two after the call, I get a notification from BookLive saying that she signed your contract and she paid the 50% down payment. So pretty amazing.

$1,500 in the bank, signed contract and a date on the calendar, which is my highest paid local date to date. And that makes me feel great.

Like I do feel like I'm putting out that energy of, you know, I'm worth more and I'm charging more for that and it's, it's working. I gotta be more consistent about it.

I also should reevaluate, like is that fifteen hundred dollars for the first hour and then five hundred for each additional hour?

Is that pricing model actually, you know, working or should I change it to a flat thousand dollar an hour kind of thing? Especially because like I'm providing a pretty nice TA system and my musical talent is there, so I think I do a great job.

Plus the customer service I provide is pretty top notch, especially when I use BookLive to manage all the details of the gig. So you tell me, should I change my pricing model to just a flat thousand dollars an hour?

I also do worry like if I just change it to a flat thousand dollars an hour. Well, what if it's an hour long gig when I'd be shooting myself in the foot Because I've been doing 1500 for the first hour, which a lot of people do, pay that for just one hour.

So maybe it's 1500 for the first hour and then a thousand dollars an hour after that. Make $3,500 on the next three hour gig. I know, well, we'll think about it. So that is all I got for you guys today.

So if anything, I hope this encourages you to raise your rates because if I. One person, a soloist, makes three, $3,000 per gig. By the way, I'm not DJing. I see.

That's a, you know, there's some people out there that say you can charge $10,000 for doing a whole day of music, but then you actually are required to learn how to use turntables and DJ for somebody's wedding reception.

I'm not all about that. I don't. I don't have the personality to get people on the win score. It's not my interest, not my wheelhouse.

So if I, as a soloist who does not dj can make $3,000 for three hours of my time, I believe you can do it, too. And if you want some help on that, hit me up.

I've got some time on my calendar to help you with the strategy. Just go to fulltimemusicacademy.com call and we'll hop on a call, help you map out a strategy to get you where you want to go.

So that's all I got for you.

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