How band members get paid — and what you should be able to see

You play in the band. You do not run it. Somebody else takes the booking, agrees the fee and works out who gets what, and at some point money arrives in your account — usually with nothing attached to explain it, sometimes weeks after the gig, occasionally not the amount you were expecting.

This is what happens in between, written for the person playing rather than the person organising. Very little of it is complicated. Most of it is simply never said out loud.

Where the money comes from

A gig is paid for in one of two ways.

Either the client pays the band directly — a couple getting married, a company throwing a party — in which case there is usually a deposit when the booking is made and the balance at or around the event. Or an agency sold the date, in which case the client pays the agency and the agency pays the band, keeping a share for having found the work. Some agencies take that share before passing the money on; some invoice for it separately.

Either way, the figure that matters to you is the one that reaches the band, not the one the client was quoted. Those two numbers are not the same, and a good deal of the confusion about band pay comes from somebody comparing one against the other without realising it.

If your band has a manager as well as, or instead of, an agency, they take a share too — for finding and running the work over time rather than for selling one date.

None of that is sinister. It is worth knowing because it explains why the figure you hear in the pub and the figure that lands in your account are different, and why nobody has stolen anything.

What comes off before anybody is paid

Once the band has the money, two things come out before anybody's share is worked out.

The first is the cut: the agency's commission or the manager's percentage, if it has not already been taken. What is left is the band pot — the money the players themselves are dividing.

The second is travel. And the order of those two steps matters more than anything else on this page.

Why travel comes out first

Five players, five postcodes. One of you lives twenty minutes from the venue. One of you drove the length of a motorway and back, and paid for the fuel out of their own pocket.

Split the pot five ways and leave everybody to swallow their own travel, and the person who drove has just subsidised the evening for the person who did not. Do that every weekend for a year and it is a real amount of money moving quietly from one member of a band to another, for no reason except where they each happen to live.

So the fair order is: take everybody's travel out of the pot first, give it back to whoever made the journey, then split what is left. It costs the band nothing to do it this way round — the same money goes out of the same account either way — and it means everyone is paid the same for playing and nobody is out of pocket for driving.

Costs that belong to the whole band rather than to one person come out at the same stage and go back to whoever paid them: a hired van, the car park, a PA hire, the extra room when the gig was too far to drive home from.

Your share, and why it is not the bass player's number

What is left after all of that is divided equally between the people who played.

So the share itself is the same for everybody. What lands in your account is not, because your travel goes back on top of your share and theirs goes back on top of theirs. If you drove furthest you will see the largest total, and you have not been paid more for playing — you have been paid the same for playing and reimbursed more for driving.

That is the sentence worth carrying around: equal share, own travel on top. If your band does it some other way, that is allowed — plenty of bands pay a leader more, or work to a fixed amount per player per gig — but you should know which way yours works, and it should be the same way every month rather than something that gets decided again each time.

What a statement should show you

At the end of the month, or after every gig, you should get something in writing. Call it a statement. It is the difference between being paid and being paid an amount you can check.

One that is doing its job shows you:

• Every gig in the period, by name and date — so you can see nothing has been missed.
• What each gig paid you: your share of that gig, stated on its own.
• Your travel on each one, and the journey it was worked out from.
• Any expenses you claimed, and whether they have been approved.
• A total — and, just as important, what has actually been paid, and when.

A number in a message is not a statement. Neither is a photograph of a spreadsheet only one person can open. The test is simple: could you take what you have been sent and redo the arithmetic yourself? If you could, it is a statement. If the only way to check it is to ask the person who wrote it, it is a figure.

You should be able to see how your own number was worked out

Here is the opinion, stated plainly, because somebody should state it.

Every member of a band ought to be able to see how their own pay was arrived at: what the band was paid, what came off it, what their travel was, and what the equal share worked out at. Not a total handed down. The working.

That is not the same as demanding to see what everybody else earns, and it is not an accusation that anyone is on the fiddle. Almost nobody is. The overwhelming majority of band money disputes are arithmetic done in the wrong order, on a phone, late at night, by somebody who has just finished loading a van.

But a split nobody can check is not a split anybody should accept. It puts whoever does the money in an impossible position, because every honest mistake then looks like a motive. And it puts everybody else in the position of having to trust rather than know. Bands fall out over this constantly. They very rarely fall out over actual theft.

If you are the one asking, ask for the working rather than for other people's totals. It is a far easier thing for a bandleader to say yes to, and it is the thing you actually wanted.

Deps, and what happens to your money

Sooner or later you will not be able to make a gig and somebody will cover for you.

The convention in UK function work is that the band pays its own member exactly as though they had played, and the member pays the dep. That sounds the wrong way round the first time you hear it, and it is not: the band's books stay the same shape every month, and there is one clear amount between you and the person who covered, rather than somebody who is not in the band turning up on the band's paperwork.

The part that gets forgotten is travel. The dep drove, not you. The travel on that gig is their journey from their postcode, not yours from yours — and if it is worked out from yours and you live round the corner from the venue, the dep is out of pocket and you are the one who will end up making up the difference.

Both halves of that are worth reading properly: what a dep is and how depping works, and what a dep actually costs, and who pays whom.

Keep your own record anyway

However good your band's paperwork is, you almost certainly play for more than one band, and no single band has the whole picture of your year. You do.

Keep, for every gig: the date, who it was for, where it was, what you were paid, the journey you made and a photograph of any receipt. It takes a minute on the night and it saves an evening in January. Whether you keep it in a notebook, a spreadsheet or something that keeps it for you matters much less than keeping it at all — and it is the one piece of this that is entirely in your own hands.

What this site does for a player is exactly that record, kept across every band you are in and every band you dep for.

See it worked out

If you would rather watch the arithmetic happen than take any of it on trust, put a fee, a cut and your own band's postcodes into the band pay split calculator. It is free, it needs no account, and you can watch the travel come off before the split and see what changes when one player is a dep from somewhere else entirely.

How it works walks through the same sequence from the band's side, how UK function bands split gig money does it as a worked example with real numbers, and the glossary has the rest of the words people use as though you already knew them.