23/08/26 10:25 Filed in:
The PreparationFor the audience, a concert is usually 90 minutes or so. You come, you listen, you enjoy the music—and then it’s over.
Sometimes people wonder why an artist is paid so much for performing for just an hour or two. What is easy to forget is everything that happens before those 90 minutes.
There are countless hours of practising, rehearsing, planning, travelling and preparing. For a tour, this can go on for weeks or months, involving not only the artist but many people working behind the scenes.
So if you look at the fee against all those hours—not just the time spent on stage—the calculations quickly normalize.
We don’t spend our working lives performing for 90 minutes. We spend them preparing for those 90 minutes.
Of course, the financial return can vary, and sometimes it hardly reflects the time and effort that goes into a performance. But there is another kind of return: the satisfaction of creating something meaningful, connecting with an audience, and continuing to grow as an artist. That part is difficult to put a price on.
Perhaps that is one of the strange things about being an artist: the audience sees the final moment, but not all the time and effort that made it possible.Tags: The Preparation, The Part You Don’t See
