Hi all, Thomas Frey here! Have you ever arrived to a concert early, sat down in the audience, and, watching the musicians meander to their seats and nonchalantly test their instruments, wonder to yourself how much do these people make? Is it a lot, or not that much at all? Maybe your cousin was a musician who needed to teach to make a living. Maybe your aunt hit it big on The Voice, holds two platinum albums, and has a garage full of Ferraris. Musicians are strange people anyways, especially when it pertains to our income. So how much DO we make?
To answer this I must first address how we receive money and how we allocate it. Many of our concerts this season are Pay What You Can, with suggested donations of $10. We also sprinkle in a few ticketed concerts here and there to cover specific venue costs, but the majority of our money comes from donations. Most organization take at least 3 or 4 years to become profitable, and we’re so close to passing this line! If ticket sales and concert donations alone were enough to cover our costs, this is what we would spend our donations on:
Only joking! Granted, the wonderful Fractured Atlas helps with a good chunk of our costs, but since Loop38 has still not received ~platinum status~ on our album yet (hoping the jury’s still out on that one), we rely on online donations to lessen the financial deficit our concerts create. But speaking seriously, a more accurate depiction of where we allocate our campaign donations looks something like this:
The unfortunate reality is that the spending we cut when our budget exceeds our income comes from our musician’s pay. Now $6,000 is a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. But when a stage-full of talented musicians dedicate all of their energy to bring unique, and underplayed music to life, spending hours practicing, rehearsing and thoroughly learning these pieces, we want to give them as close to a fair wage as we can. To upset this deficit, many of our core artists donate part or all of their pay as honorarium for our guest artists.
15 extraordinary people already donated to our campaign online, covering a whopping 3rd of our $4,000 #GivingTuesday donation goal. As a contemporary ensemble we want to share new music of all types to the Houston community we love, with its people of all types and backgrounds. Above all else we want to give you the opportunity to hear some weird music, whether you’re into that or not. If you enjoy the music we make, great! If not, that’s okay; it is a little strange after all. If you do enjoy our music, however, please consider donating so we can keep performing it. However big or small, every bit helps make us a permanent part of Houston.
– Thomas