What to pay a sub, and who actually pays them

You cannot make the 14th. Ten minutes of messages later somebody good is covering it, 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 once in a while it costs you real money. But "usually" is not a number, and the reason sub money causes so much quiet friction in cover bands is that three parties are involved and only two of them are ever talking at any one time.

This is the money side of using a sub, with round numbers, written for the player doing the asking.

Who is actually paying whom?

There are always three parties, and naming them settles most of the confusion on its own.

• The band. It has a fee for the night, and it owes each of its players a share of it.
• You. You are in the band. You are not playing this one, but your chair is still yours and the band's obligation for that date is still to you.
• The sub. 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 sub. The band and the sub, in most bands, have no money relationship at all — which is exactly why money should not travel along that line.

So the chain is short, and worth saying out loud once: the band pays you as though you had played. You pay the sub.

That looks like a detour. It is not. It protects all three of you:

• The band's books never change shape. Five players, five rows, five statements, every gig. A sub is not a sixth person on the band's paperwork, and nobody has to redo the arithmetic because a stand-in charges differently from a member.
• Your share stays yours. That is the part that gets lost when a band pays a sub directly and then quietly forgets whose share it came out of.
• The sub deals with one person. They agreed a number with you. They chase you, not a bandleader they have never met.
• There is a record on both sides. The band recorded what it paid you. You recorded what you paid the sub. Nobody is relying on remembering a conversation from March.

British bands call this person a dep rather than a sub. Same chair, same arithmetic, different word.

What do bands actually pay a sub?

Three answers are in common use, and none of them is wrong.

A flat fee. You agree a number for the night. Clean, predictable, and the easiest thing to say in a message. The risk is that it drifts out of date: a number you set three years ago is now either insulting or expensive.

The same share a member takes home. Whatever the split produces that night, the sub gets it, and you keep nothing. Tidy, easy to explain, and generous — a lot of players do this without thinking about it, on the basis that the gig was not theirs to profit from.

A flat fee with travel on top. The middle option, and the one that scales best when subs come from different distances. It is also the one that matches how most bands handle travel internally, which makes it the easiest to explain to a sub who asks how the number was arrived at.

The choice is yours. What is not optional is choosing before you ask, and saying which one it is in the message where you ask.

What it costs you, with numbers

Round numbers, a five-piece, one wedding. The arithmetic is the same one in how cover bands split gig money, which is worth reading first if the order of operations is new to you.

The fee is $1,800. The bandleader takes 15% for booking and running the band, so $270 comes off the top and the band pot is $1,530. (If your band runs itself there is no cut, the pot is the whole fee, and everything below is identical.)

The band takes everybody's travel out of the pot before splitting it, at a flat 30 cents a mile for the round trip from each player's own ZIP code. You play keys. Your own round trip to this venue would have been 40 miles. The sub covering you has a 180-mile round trip.

Player	Round trip	Travel
Ana	20 miles	$6.00
Ben	60 miles	$18.00
Chloe	60 miles	$18.00
Dev	90 miles	$27.00
You, sub covering	180 miles	$54.00
Total travel		$123.00

So the split runs:

Band pot	$1,530.00
Everybody's travel	−$123.00
Left to split five ways	$1,407.00
Each equal share	$281.40

The band pays you $335.40 — your share of $281.40, plus $54.00 of travel that belongs to the drive the sub actually made.

Then what you keep depends entirely on what you agreed:

What you agreed	You pay out	You keep
A flat $150, travel on top	$204.00	$131.40
The share the member would have taken home	$335.40	nothing
Their rate is $300, travel on top	$354.00	−$18.60

All three of those happen every weekend somewhere. The third one is not a disaster — it is a reasonable price for a gig you could not play being covered properly by somebody who will make the band sound good. It is only a problem if you did not know it was coming.

Does the sub's longer drive cost the band?

A little, and it is worth being straight about it.

If you had played, the travel out of the pot would have been $81.00 rather than $123.00. That leaves $1,449.00 to split, and an equal share of $289.80 instead of $281.40. So everybody's share on that gig is $8.40 lower because your sub came from 140 miles farther out than you would have.

Nobody should be difficult about eight dollars. But it is real money, it comes out of four other people's nights, and the difference between a shrug and a grievance is entirely whether they heard about it in advance. One message to whoever runs the band — "heads up, my sub is coming from two hours out" — is the whole fix.

What to agree before you ask

Four lines in the message where you ask them, not four weeks later:

• The fee. A flat number, or "the same as a member's share, which is usually around X" — and if you say that, say what it depends on.
• Travel. On top, or included? Your band works travel out from the traveler's own ZIP code, so tell them that, and tell them you will need their ZIP code for the gig.
• When you will pay. If the band pays out three weeks after the gig, say so. Subs are almost always fine with a known date and almost never fine with silence.
• How. However the two of you normally move money. If they invoice you, ask them to send it before the gig so it is not a loose end afterward.

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

What if the band pays the sub directly?

It happens, and it is not wrong. A sub who has covered the same band twenty times, a band with no bandleader taking a cut, somebody who would rather settle everything on the night — there are plenty of good reasons.

If yours does, write down three things:

1. That it happened, against that gig, so the next person to read the books can see a payment to somebody who is not in the band and understand why.
2. What the band paid the sub, 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 drive was the sub's. Whatever the band pays for it, it belongs to their mileage, not yours.

The failure here is dull and expensive: the band pays the sub 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 worth keeping

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

Keep five things, in one place, for every gig you sub 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 answers every question that can be asked about that night, whether it is the sub's ("did you ever pay me for the June 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.

Try it with your own numbers

Every figure above is one the arithmetic produced, not one anybody picked. Put your own fee, your own players, your own ZIP codes and your own sub into the band gig pay split calculator — switch it to US at the top, and it has a field for a sub covering a player, works the travel from the sub's ZIP code, and shows every share to the cent. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for and nothing is stored.

If your band plays every weekend and this is a monthly conversation rather than a yearly one, Event Band Manager keeps it: the gig stays on your schedule whether you played it or somebody covered, your statement shows the share and the travel paid to you for that date, and there is an I've paid them button against the sub so settled is a recorded fact rather than a feeling. Members are free — there is a page on what a musician gets.