Inflation has been averaging around 3% annually (*). This means that a dollar in 2011 will be worth $0.97 in 2012. For professional musicians, wages lag substantially behind the economy, despite the efforts of the labor unions. As such, musicians watch their revenues dwindle away little by little each year. Perhaps, because their earnings are so low already, this steady decline is imperceptible. Maybe a life of riding in cargo elevators at hotels, or getting shoved into empty rooms to eat the drippings from the food line has numbed them to their own reality.
To put this in concrete terms, consider the value of $100, that which musicians affectionately call a "bill", a "buck", or a "dollar". Twenty years ago $100 was worth about $167. Push it back to 1980 and it rises to $264. Despite its dropping value, musicians (and those who hire them) seem to really like the number 100. After all, it's a nice round number. It has its own denomination. It's also the first three-digit integer. Whatever the reason, the net result is the same: $100 is the perceived cost of hiring a professional musician to perform for four hours on a Saturday night. It was that way in 1990. It's still that way in 2011. I'm guessing it'll be the same in 2020. And incidentally, the current AFM Union scale for such a performance (as a sideman) is $80.
So what can $100 actually get you these days? A typical Houston electric bill runs around $300-$400/month in the summer. Cell phone, $150. Cable/Internet, $160. Car note, $400. Dinner for two at moderately priced restaurant, $60. In other words, $100 does very little in terms of managing your cost of living. And Houston is on the high end of the gig spectrum. In New York City, where things cost a great deal more, gigs pay a third of what they do here (supply and demand at work).
Club owners, and others who do the hiring, view this in less sympathetic terms. The flip-side of paying musicians is that for each dollar earned, there's only the margin available to invest in entertainment. For example, if an owner choses to pay a musician $100 in a place that enjoys a 50% profit on sales, they'll need to sell $200 to cover that cost, which is why cover charges are so appealing: they provide a straight-in, straight-out revenue model. But, oops, customers are resistant to cover charges. They can always get their music for free elsewhere. That's the next zinger in all this: musicians are constantly undermining attempts at a united front. Competition, which is a sign of a healthy economy, tends to drive the price to its minimum -- which is exactly what happened in NYC, Los Angeles, Austin and other big music towns. That minimum is bounded, however, by the cool sound of round numbers. Like 100. Hence, we're stuck.
I leave you with the problem stated in reverse. $80 today was worth $100 ten years ago. $60 was worth $100 twenty years ago. Where will we be in 2020?
