The Economics of an American Piano Player

I’m not an economist, but the math doesn’t add up here: for all the supposed freedoms US citizens are promised, there are equal excuses as to why some of us aren’t granted the same liberties. Clearly some feel its constitution applies only to “citizens,” not “residents,” but how does it apply to the upper class vs. the poor? If free speech applies to a multi-billion dollar corporation where money is considered speech, then doesn’t the megaphone of corporate hedge funds drown out one tiny human voice?

In theory, service industry employees earn tips based on their quality of service, but in practice the largest corporations offer both paltry pay and customer service. Their bottom line is how many dollars make it to the top investors, and at the bottom wages of $2.13/hour tipped employees absolutely depend on that increasingly deceptive gratuity from customers. In the Southeast United States, tipping culture is especially pronounced and encouraged. Throwing a crisp $20 bill at someone is a flash of wealth and generosity, but it became a carnival game for many astute piano bar players on a certain cruise line of a familiar name. Las Vegas card dealers and piano players churn through tipping tourists where cash abounds and dreams are shattered on the street in poverty. I see it most days there from upper crust, air conditioned audiences visiting from Europe or Asia, and the unhoused out on the street in the scorching desert sun. Tipping culture is a foreign, American thing and I tend to agree: It’s a form of song and dance with bullets flying toward my feet.

Since studying music, business, copyright and the first amendment in school and working three decades in the real world, here’s my report on the economics of an American pianist. Good piano bar entertainers draw between $50 and $1000 a night in tips, depending on location and how adept their carnival game is. In contrast an average performance guarantee from a bar, restaurant, or hotel is in the $100 to $300 range, and private parties should pay double. Average that up over four or five nights a week and it’s more than a comfortable living, but at what cost?

I recently thought, “What is my risk/reward for playing piano in high profile tourist venues?” If I continue working on ships, in dive bars, and at five star hotels around Bourbon Street the risk is high, cost of living increasing, while employee investment and retention are near non-existent. Most venues I’ve seen just invested their COVID stimulus in expanding their real estate, not in the workers who built the business.

The writing is on the wall of a bad employer, I posit, when gratuities outweigh wages by more than 1:1. That’s where an employer can afford to pay beyond the legal minimum, but won’t. They get what they pay for. Often enough I even see musicians accepting arrangements where tips, food, drinks, drugs, or a bed substitute for guaranteed pay, but that’s a slippery slope and unacceptable as rent and rehab bills come due. Some businesses might self-importantly guarantee musicians a percentage of sales, taking our focus from making music to selling alcohol in bars.

More broadly, being stuck with a bad employer is the equivalent of pulling a “Go to Jail” card from the Community Chest in the game of real-life monopoly. Calling wage slavery “restitution for a crime conviction from a jury of your peers” is little consolation, in a system still segregated by race and class. Calling admin errors, chargebacks, and wage garnishment anything but wage theft is disingenuous. Let’s call prison for profit what it is: chattel slavery. Let’s call its judicial demographics what they are: racist and classist. Homegrown and traditional chattel slavery didn’t start here, but United States born companies still pay as little as three cents per hour to Americans for involuntary work, following the letter of the law. This where a living wage has surpassed $15/hour and the preferred law is even less than half that.

Earning tips, service employees are only guaranteed $2.13 per hour if they are acknowledged legally in the workplace at all. Slavery is just part of the deal when you buy that $5 fast food meal but it’s not just the customers, sharecroppers or franchisees who benefit fom wage slavery; the major share of responsibility comes down to the executives, stockholders and banks of every unethical public and private business. If you have a pension or stock invested in Google for example, that probably is you since the Federal Trade Commission recently ruled it a true monopoly.

Comparing and contrasting the 19th and 21st Centuries in the US: Primarily European men in Eastern states entered into a domestic war where southern slavery became a fashionable foe, yet many northerners owned slaves too and slavery still exists on paper. What we were and still are fighting for in America is economic equity across the most diverse country on Earth, now including places that used to be Mexico. If all communities could vote with ballots and dollars throughout history, our communities would look very different. Greed wins out now but some say anarchy would ensue if a murderer’s vote counts. Isn’t a handful of terrorists acting on radical extremist propaganda already too much? This is our current state of capitalism so anarchy doesn’t sound much different.

They were and are colloquially called Jim Crow laws, whose origin was a taunting, painted black face propaganda caricature from 1828. Cultural misappropriations have spat in the face of every African American ever before and after, but so called “minorities” often make up the majority in major cities like New Orleans. Everywhere immigrants work back of house jobs like line cooks, bar backs, even doing stage sound and maintenance at piano venues. Union busting, wage garnishment and ongoing corruption are the latest incarnations of Jim Crow. Even the collective laws’ name in the press perpetuates the memory of a well documented, racist judicial system.

I’m of the opinion violent extremism is simply more reported through instantaneous and 24 hour news coverage, but statistics are also increasing. Mass shootings and terror attacks are so common I was hardly surprised when one happened on my daily commute in New Orleans on New Year’s Day. When friends ask if I’m safe, I respond, “Define ‘safe.’” I worked in the spotlight on Bourbon Street long enough to know it’s not safe there, partly why it attracts 18 million crazy people like me every year. The craziness just hit a crescendo in the years since COVID shut everyone in, squeezing people and businesses to a breaking point.

In my own crazy self-identity, I imagine John Lennon holding his two fingers up promoting peace, while writing a bunch of music some may hear but no one really listens to. I imagine Lennon sitting across from my alter-ego, a Richard Nixon type crook holding the same peace symbol, grumbling “I…am not a capitalist.” Capitalism presumes I’m in business to make money, but I’m only in business because surviving capitalism mandates it. The bottom line for me was always making music, and I have successfully done so full time for 35 years.

Capitalism is failing everyone, even the greedy ones at the top. For every desperate cop and crook on the street, we’ll never win the war on terror by sending more guns abroad and buying ice cream for the babies at home. Inevitably many of those guns make it onto American streets, and now they can be 3D printed at home. I don’t feel safer with firearms everywhere, do you? While the right to bear arms is in the Constitution’s Second Amendment, many gloss over the First Amendment’s freedom of speech. There is a thriving underdog in print and internet media, but music and movie studios have a stranglehold on even unionized workers. Major, publicly-traded press is now fully aligned with policies of corporate, capitalist greed at gunpoint.

If capitalism worked I’d still be in debt now, but life made me follow other plans to resist it. After filing taxes in five states over 10 years since age 14 and beyond my youth, enough time and money were taxed without representation to support wars and industries I didn’t agree to then or now. Now I’m more selective with gigs, but not just on the basis of pay. I actively avoid politics and corporations like the plague they are, independently earning less now than ever and still surviving. It appears everyone else is making a lot more money than me, but most people are not earning $100/hour playing piano, are they?

Back when I accepted every $50 gig, my tax returns averaged barely $20k in annual income making music full time. In my best reaction to this life I let my driver’s license expire, only renewing my passport, saving the cost of owning a car, boycotting the energy and automotive industries to boot. For 20 years I owned and paid for cars (about as long as I filed my own tax returns) but eventually realized how valuable time was compared to meeting the deadlines of a car payment or tax season. The last five years were instead designed around traveling on less than $13,000 a year on public transportation and my own two feet, avoiding four wheels. Sometimes I’ll get pissed off waiting in transit a day for a public bus or flight delay, but remember: now I have a lot more valuable time to spend than money, being semi-retired and self-employed part time contracting gigs at many venues wherever I want to go in the world. (All aboard, San Juan Puerto Rico!)

Budget backpacking or even adventure hitchhiking, one can follow great weather year round, and find a piano venue most anywhere. With friends and colleagues I try to stay centrally for a tourist season or live off grid on nothing but my half-baked wits. Carney sailor habits die hard. For decades I largely used public transportation learning to travel far and wide, often uncomfortably on fumes. It’s the strangest experience to go from living without shelter to playing piano in a suit and tie at luxury hotels I’ll never afford to stay in.

The fact that Patreon is my platform of choice now is conforming just enough to prove me wrong about capitalism, but in any case this is a good site to manage my own media distribution. With my business education both in and out of accredited institutions, it’s funny that an anti-capitalist will be playing a Steinway piano on the ground floor of the tallest building in Viejo San Juan, humorously marked Banco Popular in the 1930s art deco façade. It reminds me of being back at the Masonic Hotel during Napier New Zealand’s Art Deco Weekend, but Masonry is a conspiracy for another author to write.

If you ask me, I’ve been slowly retiring from playing in piano bars. I often go play with friends and colleagues sitting in for a tune or two, but arrive and leave when I want and rarely get paid anything for an impromptu song. Lately sitting in on trumpet with New Orleans friends provided a chance to practice my dormant friend. Busking on piano in some locations, I clock my income at $20 to $100 per hour. That’s what my time is demonstrably worth, and I also earn it by haggling about how much it costs me to play 1920s music on an acoustic piano. Hell, a symphony orchestra in Minneapolis once hired me to play “Beethoven on a Pink Balloon.”

Travel anywhere within the continental US reliably costs $100 or less, if you know how. Accounting for food and lodging it costs around $500 per day to play up to five hours. That assumes I can show up with nothing but a backpack, and play an acoustic piano provided at the venue. That takes most of the bullshit gigs off the table to begin with, but I can usually furnish an acoustic instrument if needed anywhere in the US. However I do still need to eat and travel, and 50% of my working hours I give to great upcoming artists who couldn’t pay that much. My schedule is free for that, when all I do is one to four good paying gigs a month.

In conclusion, I do not claim to be a slave of the system. If anything I’m potentially in the upper percentile of income earners if I worked on piano five nights a week. From where I sit though, it’s time to speak up in protest about the link between capitalism, slavery, and war, through the eyes of a piano entertainer.

© 2025 David E. Hull all rights reserved. Support Dave Hull and read his essays on Patreon at www.patreon.com/DaveEHull and get in touch with him via email at DEHAMusicCo@gmail.com.