What a dep actually costs you, and who pays whom

You cannot make the 14th. Somebody good can. Ten minutes later it is sorted, and you go back to your evening without ever quite working out what it is going to cost you.

Usually it costs you very little, and sometimes it costs you nothing at all. But "usually" is not a number, and the reason dep money causes so much low-level friction in bands is that three people are involved and only two of them are ever talking at any one time.

This is the money side of depping, in the member's voice, with round numbers. If you want the etiquette — what a dep should be told, what to ask, who confirms them — that is what is a dep.

The three people in the transaction

There are always three parties, and it helps to name them:

• The band. It has a fee for the night from the client or the agency, and it owes each of its players a share of it.
• You. You are a member of the band. You are not playing this one, but your place in the band is still yours, and the band's obligation for that date is still to you.
• The dep. They are doing one night's work, for you, on your instrument, in your chair.

The band's relationship is with you. Your relationship is with the dep. The band and the dep, in most bands, have no money relationship at all — which is exactly why nobody should be sending money along that line.

The band pays you. You pay the dep.

Say the whole chain out loud once and it stops being confusing.

The band pays you as though you had played. Your equal share of the pot, plus the travel for the journey that was actually made — which is the dep's journey, not yours, because they are the one who drove.

You pay the dep whatever the two of you agreed.

It looks like a detour. It is not. It is the arrangement that protects all three of you:

• The band's books never change shape. Five players, five rows, five statements, every gig. A dep is not a sixth person on the band's paperwork, and the band never has to re-do its arithmetic because somebody's stand-in charges differently from a member.
• Your share stays yours. That is the bit that gets lost when a band pays a dep directly and then quietly forgets whose share it came out of.
• The dep deals with one person. They agreed a number with you. They chase you, not a band they have no relationship with, and not an agency they have never heard of.
• There is a record on both sides. The band recorded what it paid you. You recorded what you paid the dep. Nobody is relying on remembering a conversation from March.

What it actually costs you — with numbers

Round numbers, a five-piece, one wedding.

The fee is £1,800. The band has a manager who takes 15%, so £270 comes off and the band pot is £1,530. (If your band runs itself, there is no cut and the pot is the whole fee — the rest of the arithmetic is identical.)

The band takes everybody's travel out of the pot before splitting it, at 25p a mile for the round trip. You are the keys player. Your usual round trip to this venue would have been 40 miles. Nadia is depping for you, and her round trip is 180 miles.

Player	Round trip	Travel back
Ana	20 miles	£5
Ben	60 miles	£15
Chloe	60 miles	£15
Dev	90 miles	£22.50
You, Nadia covering	180 miles	£45
Total travel		£102.50

So the split runs:

Band pot	£1,530
Travel back to players	−£102.50
To split five ways	£1,427.50
Each equal share	£285.50

The band pays you £330.50 — your share of £285.50, plus £45 of travel that belongs to the journey Nadia made.

Now the two things worth noticing.

One: the dep's longer journey costs the whole band a little. If you had played, the total travel would have been £67.50 rather than £102.50, leaving £1,462.50 to split and an equal share of £292.50. So everybody's share on that gig is £7 lower because your dep came from 140 miles further than you would have. That is not a scandal, and nobody should be difficult about it, but it is real, and it is worth a heads-up to whoever runs the band rather than a surprise on the statement.

Two: what you keep depends entirely on what you agreed. Say Nadia's fee is £150, and you agreed that her travel comes on top:

The band pays you	£330.50
You pay Nadia (£150 + £45 travel)	−£195
You keep	£135.50

Some members would not keep it. Plenty of bands work on "the dep gets what I would have got", in which case you pass the whole £330.50 on and keep nothing, which is tidy and easy to explain. And it can go the other way: if Nadia's rate for that night is £300 plus travel, you pay out £345 against the £330.50 you received and you are £14.50 down — which is a perfectly reasonable price for a gig you could not play being covered properly, as long as you knew it before you asked her.

The point is not which of those three you choose. It is that you choose it in advance.

What to agree with your dep, before the gig

Four lines in a message, sent when you ask them, not after they have played:

• The fee. A flat number, or "the same as a member's share on the night, which is usually around X" — but if you say that, say what it depends on.
• Travel. On top, or included? Your band works it out from the traveller's own postcode, so tell them that, and tell them you will need their postcode for the gig.
• When you will pay. If the band pays out three weeks after the gig, say so. Deps are almost always fine with a known date and almost never fine with silence.
• How. Bank transfer on the day the band pays you is the usual answer; if they invoice you, ask them to send it before the gig so it is not a loose end.

That is the whole negotiation. It takes a minute and it removes every single awkward conversation that would otherwise happen in six weeks' time.

When the band pays the dep directly instead

It happens, and it is not wrong. A dep who has covered the same band twenty times, a band with no manager and an informal float, a bandleader who would rather settle everything on the night — there are plenty of reasons a band pays a dep straight out.

If yours does, write down three things:

1. That it happened, against that gig, so the next person to read the accounts can see a payment to somebody who is not in the band and understand why.
2. What the band paid the dep, and what it therefore did not pay you. Your share went to them. It must not also come to you, and neither of you should be working that out from memory.
3. Whose travel it was. The journey was the dep's. Whatever the band pays for it, it is their mileage, not yours.

The failure mode here is dull but expensive: the band pays the dep on the night, and then the monthly statement pays your full share to you as well, because the statement did not know. One line written down at the time prevents it.

The record that makes January straightforward

You were not at the gig. Six months later, a payment from the band and a payment out to somebody you barely remember booking are the only traces of it, and neither of them explains itself.

Keep five things, in one place, for every gig you dep out:

• the band, the gig and the date
• who covered you
• what you agreed to pay them
• what the band paid you for that date
• whether you have settled up

That is it. It is enough to answer every question that can be asked about that night, whether it is the dep's ("did you ever pay me for the Bath one?") or your own at the end of the year. How each side of it is treated when you do your books is a question for whoever does them — but they cannot treat it at all if it was never written down.

If you use Event Band Manager, this is already the shape of things: the gig is on your diary whether you played it or somebody covered, your statement shows the share and the travel that were paid to you for that date, and there is an I've paid them button against the dep so settled is a recorded fact rather than a feeling. There is more about the player's side on for musicians.

Try it with your own numbers

Every figure above is one the arithmetic produces, not one anybody chose. Put your own fee, your own players, your own postcodes and your own dep into the band gig pay split calculator — it has a field for a dep covering a player, works the travel out from the dep's postcode, and shows every share to the penny. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for and nothing is stored.

And if you want the full picture of how the fee becomes those five numbers in the first place, that is how UK function bands split gig money. The dep is not an exception to it. The dep is just the row where the postcode belongs to somebody else.