How much £?

darius

If you charge or get £250 for pub gigs how much do you charge for private parties and weddings. Parties and weddings who want you just like you are at the pub gigs. ie not a wedding jukebox band.

darius

(I’m looking for your actual experience not a theoretical one. )

Danny1969

Normally £800 up for parties, £1200 up for weddings. Bear in mind a wedding can take up half your day and all night depending on the load in \ soundcheck arrangements so you need a fair bit of dough to make it worthwhile.

Not done a pub band gig for £250 since about 1995 I think, that's more like duo money . 

sw67

We charge double and only do weddings for mates or people who know us from regular gigs. We are a pub band and its a hobby so try our best not to do any functions. The going rate round my way is £200 to £250 with some venues paying more depending on what the bands ask for. We charge £200 and are fully booked in local pubs every year. My mates band charges £250 but get half the gigs , more travel and are always pestering pubs for dates. 

darius

@sw67 that’s exactly our experience. 
Not in it for the money but need a bit of cash to keep us in guitar strings and plectrums. 
So you ask £400 ish for a special event?

maltingsaudio

darius said:

@sw67 that’s exactly our experience. 
Not in it for the money but need a bit of cash to keep us in guitar strings and plectrums. 
So you ask £400 ish for a special event?

I would add a bit more to your fee to give the client more, if it’s a special event you may need to hire more lights sound engineer plus PA system etc making it a show above your normal pub fare

EricTheWeary

I haven't played a gig for 18 months but I still get regular round robin emails from an agent. Money is circa £250 for pub gigs, £400 for private events, £1500 for next NYE ( yes, they are booking!).   

sw67

darius said:

@sw67 that’s exactly our experience. 
Not in it for the money but need a bit of cash to keep us in guitar strings and plectrums. 
So you ask £400 ish for a special event?

We are doing one wedding this year and yes we are charging double ( £400 ) There will be a DJ as well for first dance etc. Its for a friends daughter and while i would do it for free the other guys in the band need something for their time. 

Musicwolf

4 Piece.  We get between £250 - 300 for a pub.  For a function we would ask minimum £400 but I would like to push this up in 2020.  Although we don't do this for the money it sometimes feels as though people are taking the piss when you consider what they would pay for a DJ.

Modellista

4-piece Country and Western band - if we do a little pub gig it'll be £200, medium size event £400 minimum.  Maybe a bit more depending on the venue and how far it is.

firepaulmusic

Musicwolf said:

4 Piece.  We get between £250 - 300 for a pub.  For a function we would ask minimum £400 but I would like to push this up in 2020.  Although we don't do this for the money it sometimes feels as though people are taking the piss when you consider what they would pay for a DJ.

I think this is a very good point. Also for weddings they are happy to pay someone £400 to blow up silver balloons and make a big arch out of them.....

p90fool

We only do 6-10 pub gigs a year now, ie, the ones which pay £350-400. 

We'll also do a straightforward, very local birthday party for £400-500, and weddings are £650-750 for the simple reason that they are always more hassle and I don't like doing them. 

We don't charge proper function band money for wedding because we're not one, although we do play for 2.5-3 hours.

I'm conscious of giving good value, but refuse to be messed around any more. I doubled the price for weddings two years ago just so I could avoid doing them but it's had the opposite effect and that's now what we mainly do, though we get far fewer Bridezillas than we used to when we were too cheap. 

Danny1969

p90fool said:

I'm conscious of giving good value, but refuse to be messed around any more. I doubled the price for weddings two years ago just so I could avoid doing them but it's had the opposite effect and that's now what we mainly do, though we get far fewer Bridezillas than we used to when we were too cheap. 

That is the trick with weddings .... if you go in cheap then you are no more important than the person doing the table placement cards ..... if you charge a substantial amount of money then you become more important and you actually get a lot less hassle and become a feature of the night rather than the band wedged in a corner making some noise. 

markslade07

We’re by no means a wedding band, but we’ve now been asked to do a wedding...on New Year’s Eve this year! We don’t normally do New Years but suspect this could be a decent opportunity. As we’re not a wedding band per se, we’ve no real idea where to pitch it, but thinking around £1000? How do you go about pricing something up, what questions do you ask the prospective client?

Roland

markslade07 said:

How do you go about pricing something up, what questions do you ask the prospective client?

Questions. Timing: load in, soundcheck, start and stop, load out.

What’s the venue? Hotels usually want to see insurance certificates and PAT records. Back gardens usually have inadequate power supply or shelter from rain. Other venues sit in between. If it’s a distance to travel then you will need to think about travel costs and possibly accommodation. Is there a disco that we have to work with? Do you expect to use a mic for speeches? What song do you want for a first dance? 

I’d normally start with a base figure, and increase it to cover for extra work, rounding up to the nearest £100. When I was doing this we’d charge £250 for pubs, £800 for weddings, and £1,200 for corporate stuff. These prices reflected the extra effort, and the backup equipment you need to take.

markslade07

Roland said:

markslade07 said:

How do you go about pricing something up, what questions do you ask the prospective client?

Questions. Timing: load in, soundcheck, start and stop, load out.

What’s the venue? Hotels usually want to see insurance certificates and PAT records. Back gardens usually have inadequate power supply or shelter from rain. Other venues sit in between. If it’s a distance to travel then you will need to think about travel costs and possibly accommodation. Is there a disco that we have to work with? Do you expect to use a mic for speeches? What song do you want for a first dance? 

I’d normally start with a base figure, and increase it to cover for extra work, rounding up to the nearest £100. When I was doing this we’d charge £250 for pubs, £800 for weddings, and £1,200 for corporate stuff. These prices reflected the extra effort, and the backup equipment you need to take.

Thanks @Roland, we started at £800 but I wondered as it’s new year maybe a little more?

Roland

Don’t be afraid to go higher. I knew a landscape gardener who priced his jobs by looking at his bank balance and the customer’s car(s).

markslade07

Roland said:

Don’t be afraid to go higher. I knew a landscape gardener who priced his jobs by looking at his bank balance and the customer’s car(s).

Ha ha!

Danny1969

Maybe it's a geographical thing but where I am in the very south I don't know any decent bands that would do a wedding for less than a grand unless it was a real favour for a friend. As Roland said there's a lot to take into account and a lot of time out of your day. Here's how most weddings work for us 

Get to venue around 11 in the morning, could be a 10 minute drive, could be 2 hours. Find out who's in charge, where's the band going etc. Set up and soundcheck while the staff are setting out tables, generally this takes 90 mins to 2 hours depending on how brutal the load in is. We've fortunate enough to be in a position to charge enough money to cover our own sound and lighting engineers but it does mean we load in a huge amount of kit. Doing your own sound at a wedding can be challenging in some venues due to the odd buildings you encounter. You may also encounter sound limiters, lack of space, unearthed generators, leaky and cold marquees, mud trenched fields, lack of parking. 
Once all done then turn the gear off, leave the venue and go back home or if too far to go back home go and amuse ourselves in town. 
Then back around 7pm suited up, start playing around 8 ... do 3 x 45 min sets with 20 minute breaks.  then let the DJ finish the last half hour or so. Then break down, load out and by now it's always around 1am. Could be 2 hours drive to get home but most of the time it's 40 minutes or so. Most of the wedding venues we do tend to be posh country houses and hotels in the country so there's often some tricky roads. 

So it's a bit different to doing a pub gig, it can  take a very large chunk out of your day and the whole evening until the early hours. It's worth a couple of hundred each at least I would say

darius

Good point about the PAT test gear at a wedding venue. I better check if they care or not.

Musicwolf

markslade07 said:

We’re by no means a wedding band, but we’ve now been asked to do a wedding...on New Year’s Eve this year! We don’t normally do New Years but suspect this could be a decent opportunity. As we’re not a wedding band per se, we’ve no real idea where to pitch it, but thinking around £1000? How do you go about pricing something up, what questions do you ask the prospective client?

We don't do NY but, if we did, I'd be looking to tripple our normal £400 party fee to £1200, possibly more.  As a pro musician once said to me many years ago when he heard how much we were getting for NY "You can get £498.21* at NY for playing the spoons!"

* adjusted for inflation