How Much Money Does a Guitarist Make?

Study Guitar

Blogs

How Much Money Does a Guitarist Make?

If you’re thinking about being more serious about your playing, or you just aboslutely love playing guitar, you might think about becoming a full time guitarist - which means you have to answer the question, how much money can you make?

We all know that the rockstars doing big international tours are making a lot of money (…or are they?) but what other jobs are there, and how much can you expect to make?

In this article we’ll break down the options available and how much you can make from them.

Career Paths and Gigs

So what are the different choices available? Let’s brainstorm a list and then breakdown how they all work:

Playing your original music in your own band
Session guitarist on tour
Theater pit musician
Studio session player
YouTuber
Local guitar teacher
School guitar teacher
School music teacher
Function bands
Tribute bands

Playing Your Original Music In Your Band

While this is probably part of why a lot of teenagers start taking their guitar playing seriously, this is probably the hardest career path to be succesful in.

Making any serious income from a band requires building a pretty serious business out of it, as I outlined in why your band will never make serious money.

Getting a band to a level where you are playing nationally or even internationally and covering the running expenses of the band is an achievable goal, but to have it provide a stable income for all the band members is incredibly challenging.

For reference, when bands play at the biggest metal festivals in Europe, only the top three to four bands on the bill are making a serious income from the band, and even then it’ll only be a couple of key people. All the other bands will be working day jobs.

Session Guitarist on Tour

Being on the road with a band can have a steady pay check, while you’re on the road. According to this thead on reddit session players on the road can make $500 to $5000 per week - bear in mind the biger numbers are exceptional and the smaller numbers more achievable.

While on the road session players can also get a “per diem”, which is a daily allowance to cover food.

Of course, you only get paid while you are on tour - when the tour stops, so does your income.

Pit Musician

Pay here can vary wildly depending on where you’re playing and what you’re doing. Let’s look at a few examples:

London, United Kingdom. Playing a show every night, a single instrument: £1,218.66 per week. This works out as £63,367.20/year - if you work every night of the year!¹
Broadway pit musicians can be paid $2,143.10 per week. $111,441.20/year.²
Average US pit musician is paid $81,043/year.³ This can be as low as $35,707/year.

However these all come with the caveat that there are limited places and shows do not run all year. But, if you’re at the top of the game the money can be good.

Studio Session Player

This can be anywhere from $50/song to $1000/song. Some session players may charge hourly. The big labels are still paying good money, but those jobs are limited and you’ll probably find that there are a handful of people doing all the big jobs - they’re reliable and when you’re in the professional world, the thing people care most about is someone who is reliable with a track-record of getting the job done.

There will be smaller studios that you can easily network with who may want a guitar player. You can also advertise on Fiverr and other gig websites, but, there are a ton of people doing exactly the same thing, so it’s quite competitive which can drive down prices.

Some people get session work by posting on social media. If you have a bit of a following and you’re capable of recording at home, try putting up a few posts and see if anyone is interested.

Two negative factors that could cause a decrease in session work

There are also better and better sample libraries coming out for songwriters, so they can have a computer perform a semi-realistic guitar for them, erradicating the need for a session guitarist.

Of course, AI is also becoming a big part of every day life, and is conceivable that producers will start to use AI sound generation for different instruments, we already have AI creating entire songs and getting on the charts.

Saying that, there will always be people who value having human players.

YouTuber or Influencer

If you’re considering becoming a professional guitar player, you have almost certainly considered YouTube, TikTok and if that could work for you.

These platforms pay based on what is called “RPM”, which is short for “Revenue per Mille”, which is to say what they will pay you per 1000 views.

The RPM depends on the type of video and the ads that the platform can run on that video.

For most creators, RPM on YouTube will be around $1-$5. TikTok will pay $0.40 to $1.

So you can see that to make big money, you have to be one of the most popular influencers in the world.

You can see a breakdown of social media platforms and what they pay here.

Where The Money Comes From As An Influencer

The trick to making money on these platforms is to use them as a promotion tool, not a revenue tool.

You can make big money by:

Selling your own products
Selling your own courses
Being an affiliate for someone elses courses and products
Doing sponsored videos

As a guitarist creating your own products is quite difficult. Being an affiliate for online courses can be very effective, as can sponsored videos if you get enough viewers.

You can make your own courses - buet let me warn you, it’s a lot more work than you realise!

The big players in the courses space are making five figures a month.

UGC Creator

Another avenue of income for influencers and creators is what is known as “User Generated Content”. This is when you make a video for someone elses product.

They’ll pay you to create and post the video, or they may post the video themselves.

The amount you can charge depends on your reach, but this can start at $50 to $100, up to a few thousand dollars if you have an impressive reach.

School Guitar Teacher

Some schools have guitar teachers come into the school to give lessons. It’s a good setup - you get a big captive audience and it’s very convenienet.

But if you’re reading this, chances are your local schools already have a guitar teacher coming in, and the school will be unlikely to want to give a choice to parents or to encourage comeptition.

School lessons are often done at a very low price (sometimes subsidised by the local or national government), which can mean you earn very little.

On the plus side, these lessons are usually very low quality and the children taking them often miss school lessons to attend a guitar lesson, which is disruptive and can lead to parents looking for private guitar lessons, which we’ll cover in a minute.

School Music Teacher

Another option is to get a traditional job, which means becoming a school music teacher.

In London in the UK a music teacher can make £37,000 to £60,000 per year.⁴ In the United States a school music teacher can make $52,000 to $83,000 per year.⁵

Pretty good incomes, but those come with the usual caveats of a school job:

You’ll need a teaching qualification in addition to a music degree
You have to deal with children and their typically awful behaviour in modern schools
Teachers often work long hours in term time

But you do get school holidays off.

So it has some pros and cons. As music related jobs go, it’ll be the easiest stable job with a good income that you can find.

Function Bands

Function bands can make some good money. The best earners are usually wedding and corporate events.

A wedding band can start at £1000 for a night, up to £11,000 or more for a big production (think 15 piece band, brass section, multiple singers).

You’ll be expected to usually do two 60 minute sets and have a good setlist that clients can choose songs from.

This works out at between £250 and £730 per band member.

In the US, wedding bands make a similar amount.

You can easilly do a search for your local area to see how much wedding bands are earning in your country.

On the smaller end of the scale, local bars and restaurants often like to have live music. This can be a duet doing rock covers in a pub to a jazz duo playing a fancy wine bar.

Fees for these sort of gigs are typically £150 for two 40 minute sets.

These sort of gigs are usually used as a supplement to income, it can be challenging to turn them into a full time source of income: The client only wants to book you once for a wedding!

Wedding and function bands usually operate through an agency, whose job it is to bring them clients. Of course, the agency takes its fee. Additionally, the band has to be very well rehearsed and rehearsals are not paid.

Tribute Bands

Playing in a trbute band can be a good earner. The top tribute bands, think The Iron Maidens and The Australian Pink Floyd, can tour nationally and even internationally.

These bands can get a good fee for playing local venues, especially if it’s a special even like New Years Eve.

But, there’s also the usual challenges that go with that:

Only the top bands make serious money
Bands have huge costs associated with them
They only make money while they’re on the road

Additionally, the band has to be well rehearsed and rehearsals are not paid, and there’s the challenges of getting a band together and keeping everyone on the same page.

Local Guitar Teacher

This is by far the easiest and highest paying way to make an income as a guitar player… when done right.

A good guitar teacher in the UK can charge £30 for 30 minutes, in the US around $40 for 30 minutes.

This works out at £60 per hour or about $80 in the US.

Let’s assume you’re teaching 30 minute lessons, here’s how students and income breakdown:

Students	Hours/week	Monthly Income	Annual Income
5	2.5	$866	$10,400
10	5	$1,733	$20,800
15	7.5	$2,600	$31,200
20	10	$3,466	$41,600
25	12.5	$4,333	$52,000
30	15	$5,200	$62,400
35	17.5	$6,066	$72,800

These numbers are just for teaching 1-2-1 lessons. If you consider teaching small groups, the numbers quickly explode by a factor of three to five.

You can use the following calculators to work out potential income for 1-2-1 and group lessons:

Of course, being a local guitar teacher comes with its own challenges, the biggest being that you have to find and keep students.

The good news is that there is a surprisingly big demand for local guitar teachers and there are 1000s of students waiting to be taught - but most local guitar teachers are absolutely awful at advertising.

And advertising properly isn’t that difficult, you just have to do it the right way and approach it with the right expectations.

Teaching guitar locally and relying on agencies for guitar students or advertising poorly can leave you broke. Doing it the right way leaves your income an autopilot and allows you to make a full-time income working part-time hours.

If you’re interested in it, check out my 400+ page book where I detailed exactly how I made a full time income teaching 12 hours per week, or the coaching program where, in addition to showing exactly how I built a full time income in three months, you can get 1-2-1 personalised help setting up your own teaching business:

Guitar Teacher Training Mastermind Group

Get personalised 1-2-1 help on finding students and how to teach. If you have a problem, we're going to solve it, with this private guitar teaching community.

1-2-1 video calls every month
Fast start guide
Private student forum
Live-call recordings library

Join The Program

This 430 page book breaks down how I went from having 0 students, to making a full-time income while working part-time hours, teaching guitar.

Complete marketing plan for finding students
In-depth guide to teaching
Example lesson plans and syllabi

Get your book now!