A good friend of mine told me as I started my freelance career that musicians can only last ten years as freelancers. After ten years, the majority of people pack it up and look for other means of employment.

“Bah!” I said.

I was a tough cookie, able to put in six, seven, or eight hours in the practice room plus play gigs and do other activities. As long as the freelance doors kept opening, I could keep doing this indefinitely. Surely I’d end up with a job before ten years were up, and if not, I could keep up this lifestyle as long as I wanted to.

But here I find myself, just about ten years after having that conversation with my friend, trying like crazy to get out of this freelancing lifestyle.

What a wuss I am, right?

The frenetic pace of musical life

Playing music is not an easy way to make a living. I think that this is a fairly obvious fact. If you want to make some bucks and have a stable life, you are in the wrong profession. This is a given that I presented in the first part of this series, and it is an assumption that I hope people keep in the back of their mind while reading this series.

Given the fact that we musicians are not in it for the money and remain professional musicians despite the financial and lifestyle struggles, what are the trends in this business of which we need to be aware?

Well, the main trend that I am attempting to document in this series is that traditional performance employment opportunities in the world of classical music—primarily orchestral and academic positions, but other positions as well—are shrinking. Full-time orchestras continue to cut back, go bankrupt, and disappear, and they are (with the occasional extremely rare exception) never replaced.

Jobs are disappearing.

Competition is increasing.

Things are getting worse, not better.

I will cover these global realities of the music performance business in the tenth and final part of this series, but I’d just like to bring up this reality to illustrate that the issues facing freelancers will be faced by more and more musicians with each passing year.

Welcome to the club. Here’s a coupon for 10% off your next oil change. You’re gonna need it.

Diminishing gig circles

In the second part of this series I described the various gig circles that exist within most major metropolitan areas, and many times the gig circle you inhabit determines how long you can keep up the freelance lifestyle. People that regularly substitute in their area full-time orchestra, play touring shows, perform in the top area regional orchestra, and are the top call for the area contractors can very easily have the financial stability and artistic satisfaction of a member of a major full-time orchestra (albeit without the stability or benefits that this sort of position confers). They may teach a few students on the side who pay a premium for the expertise of such a player.

For each major metropolitan area, only a select few players on each instrument can inhabit this top gig circle. Everyone else must inhabit different gig circles from this rarified clique, and must deal with the extra driving, lower pay, and less artistically satisfying conditions that these other circles inevitably offer.

Even freelancers in the top gig circles are not immune to the frustrations, conflicts, and perils of all the aspects of freelancing, whether it be problems with balancing regional orchestras, duking it out with full-time orchestra musicians for extra work, massaging the egos of contractors, or squeezing in some private teaching. These are problems that all freelancers face, and as jobs grow ever scarcer and more high-quality performers graduate from music school with nary a job in sight competition for even these top-tier freelance spots will increase, altering the landscape for members of that gig circle. To understand why this competition increases, you can read about the balancing act that freelancers constantly face here.

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It’s all about the car

This, ultimately, is what destroys freelancers. That damnable time spent in the vehicle, driving home across state lines, with only truck drivers, deer, and inebriated drivers to keep the musician company. More often than not, the time spent in the car exceeds the time spent on stage rehearsing or performing. It’s like an office worker commuting four hours each way to work for 2 ½ hours.

Freelancers pass those driving hours in various ways. Many long-haul musicians are hardcore Audiobooks fans, (I went through a pretty serious Audiobooks phase myself), gobbling up a couple of unabridged novels each week playing gigs. Others talk on the phone to pass the time. I get many calls around midnight (or later) from colleagues on their way home from who knows what far-flung city, looking for a little company to help pass the hours.

Many people call this type of work “driving for dollars,” and that really is that it ends up becoming. I will see the same haggard faces in central Wisconsin as I did the week before in northern Indiana , and I know that I will be seeing the again the following week in central Illinois and two months later in southern Iowa. I will often find myself on gigs 90 miles from my home in Evanston, with over half of the musicians of the group also residing in Evanston. I joke to these musicians that we should have all saved ourselves the trip and rehearsed in my living room.

But it’s no joke. These drives are unsustainable over the long haul, and they shorten the career of a freelance musician faster than any other element.

I have countless horror stories of commuting all over the country, covering four states in one month, bouncing around the entire country, from South Carolina all the way to Oregon in the space of a couple of months. I am on my fourth car in seven years, having put close to 400,000 miles on these vehicles during that time span.

Actually, “driving for dollars” is too kind a term for this kind of work. Guess how much I have been compensated for that half-million miles? Not much, that’s for sure. I have never once in my freelance career been paid the Federal standard for mileage, with most of my work paying either no mileage or else less than half of the Federal rate. If you want to see some more detailed figures on the impact that this kind of driving has on your bottom line, read Part 1 of this series. Then go bang your head against a concrete piling to ease your depression from seeing these statistics.

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I decided to call it quits on this full-time freelance lifestyle during the summer of 2006. A combination of factors player into this decision—my engagement (I am getting married in August of 2007), turning 30, and the slow, creeping realization that I had fallen into a freelance quagmire. I could pay my bills and keep food on the table, but visualizing another decade of 50,000 miles of driving a year, all-night frantic dashes across the country in the dead of winter, and an endless stream of interchangeable pick-up gigs and low-quality community orchestra engagements made me shudder. I am still basically doing this work full-time at present, but I am exploring some other career options at the same time. I have always known that this kind of lifestyle (freelance musician/driver) was not for me, and each passing year only makes this fact clearer.

What may be interesting to readers is what happened to my bottom line when I dropped a lot of my work—it went up! I quit my university jobs and my long-haul drives, and I actually have more money in my pocket than I did when I was working all of these jobs.

Do you know what that means?

It means that much of this physically exhausting, nerve-wracking, highly unsatisfying lifestyle was actually COSTING me money.

I’ll delve deeper into the ramifications of this realization and what I think that freelancers can do to be smarter about their professional commitments in the final part of this series, but I can say that, for me, I was unwittingly performing a form of musical charity with much of my work, giving my money away to the Illinois and Indiana toll system, the oil industry, and countless other institutions. Employers weren’t just getting me at a discount—I was actually PAYING for the “pleasure” of criss-crossing the American Midwest.

If much of my work ended up being this kind of “charity work”, how many other freelancers are in the same boat? A lot, I’ll bet.

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This lifestyle is hard. It makes it very difficult to have a family or any semblance of a “normal” life. We musicians choose this lifestyle, of course, and we are therefore ultimately responsible for accepting the resulting conditions as. Too many of us, however, get so caught up chasing our “dream job” in a symphony orchestra that we forsake family friends, and eventually the seeds of what may have made for a much more satisfying life, all for the chance to play in an orchestra.

Is it worth it?

Think about it—is it really worth it?

For many people, it is. They are willing to pay the dues, put in the time, make the sacrifices, do the rounds, and take each and every opportunity to move forward toward their dream. For many people, it works out, and they end up in a fulfilling and meaningful employment situation. For others, they may obtain a position in an orchestra, only to later realize that their organization is deficient in some way—musically, monetarily, or structurally—and they feel trapped, unable to obtain another job due to the rigors of the audition circuit and unwilling to abandon their current job and a life as an orchestral musician. They are miserable and stuck.

Others never land that coveted full-time orchestral position. They continue either to chase after it well into their 40’s and 50’s, settle into a life of freelancing, or get out of music together.

Still others never wanted to land an orchestra gig in the first place. Never having had that expectation of a full-time orchestra job waiting for them, they decide to create their own opportunities for themselves. This will be the subject of Road Warrior Without an Expense Account Part IX – Refocusing (musical entrepreneurship).

Read the complete series:

• Part I – Adjunct University Teaching
• Part II – Realities of Professional Freelancing
• Part III – The Rise and Fall of the Full-Time Orchestra
• Part IV – Rising Tide, Shrinking Pool
• Part V – Regional Orchestras
• Part VI – The Vicious Cycle
• Part VII – Private Teaching
• Part VIII – Burnout
• Part IX – Rethinking Music Performance Degrees
• Part X – Refocusing (Musical Entrepreneurship)

Addendum I: The Real Cost of Driving to Gigs for the Freelance Musician
Addendum II: Tainting the Academic Waters with Pay-Per-Student Teaching