How To Hire Musicians
Hey! It’s Jared from BookLive.com here to help you find and hire the perfect musicians for your wedding. I wanted to talk about the difficulty of hiring musicians for your wedding. Unfortunately, for most people or maybe, fortunately, it’s their first wedding. They’ve never planned one before, they’ve only seen maybe friends or family planned them before and they don’t know what it takes to actually plan their wedding out.
And this is especially true for hiring musicians, how often do you hire musicians for the rest of your life. For most people it is Zero, this is your first time in hiring a musician and it can be scary, it can be intimidating, it can also frustrating, and take a lot of time. And of course, that time is just better spent doing other things.
If you’re able to understand the perfect musician hiring process you’d be able to save time, you’d be able to figure out exactly what you are looking for and be able to act on those decisions quickly. And then you’d be able to hire your musicians securely knowing that they are going to show up to your wedding every time and do a great job and not to have constantly ask questions.
I’m a musician myself. I also recently got married back in September. And so I’ve been on both sides of the musician hiring process for weddings. As a musician, I’ve played hundreds of weddings each year, and then as the one getting married, I hired several groups to play my wedding and they all fit in perfectly with my theme, it was a beautiful wedding!
And so if you just follow this three-step hiring process, you’re gonna have the same results. You’re gonna have a fantastic wedding with beautiful music that keeps you and your guests impressed and entertained.
So, here are the three-steps to hiring a musician:
Step 1: Searching and Narrowing process
So, just like I mentioned to one of my previous posts, you’re gonna perform a search process. You’re gonna use either friends and family to give recommendations for musicians in your area. You’re gonna use directories such as WeddingWire and TheKnot or BookLive.com and/or you’re gonna search on Google to find musicians in your area and build that list so that’s your search.
The next thing you’re gonna do is narrow that list base on your preferences. So as a couple, you each have individual tastes and you have to talk about those tastes so that you can match each other’s taste and put out the perfect entertainment that reflects you as a couple. So narrow down that list to maybe your top three (3) choices for your ceremony, your top 3 choices for your cocktail hour, and your top 3 choices for your reception. So that’s step 1, the search and the narrowing.
Step 2: Price and Availability
Of course, one of the biggest things about fitting in with your wedding is fitting in with your wedding’s budget. So, it’s always nice when musicians have this instantly available and BookLive.com actually gives you instant pricing when you’re performing your search so that it automatically saves you some steps. Availability as well, you’re gonna make sure that band and the String Quartet or whatever is available for your wedding date.
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So when you’re reaching out to them make sure that you include your date, and your time, and your venue because that’s gonna help with the pricing and the availability process.
During the pricing and availability process, some of those musicians might not be available. They might be out of your budget. So cross them off your list. And that will help you narrow it down even further. But at this point, you probably have a favorite in mind.
Step 3: Contract and Deposit
So, any musician that’s worth their weight is going to use a contract to secure the date. You use contracts to secure the other parts of your wedding like you have a catering contract, you have a venue contract. Musicians use contracts too.
In fact, the ones who’re in business for a while and take this seriously use a contract. So make sure that whenever you’re working with a musician that you decided to hire, you get a contract everything in writing, date, time, venue, payment, even as far as like the planning process goes. Get it all in writing.
And then of course in order to secure musicians, they will expect some sort of deposit. It varies between, I’ve seen flat rates of a $150.00 for some groups or 25% deposit all the way up to 50% deposit.
And then of course the closer to your date that you hire them, the higher that deposit is gonna be because the musician is taking upon some risk of saying, “Hey, I’m gonna turn down all other gigs that I could get that day to play your date”. And that’s why the deposit is in place there is because that’s the risk that they’re avoiding by securing your date. So, if you have a contract in place, and you provide the deposit you are done booking the musician.
Recap
So, if you don’t use a 3-step hiring process like this then you might actually run into problems booking the musician. They might not show up, or they might have the wrong date that’s why you use contracts to make sure it’s super clear. Or musicians might just be wishy-washy about it and it’s not their fault. It’s just that they don’t have a clear process too. So, feel free to lead them in this process.
Again, that three-step process: Step 1, was the search and narrow to find musicians who fit your personality. Step 2, was getting their prices, and availability keeps that all organize with your list of musicians. Continue the narrowing process. Then finally Step 3 is to get a contract sign by you and the musicians and then leave their deposit.
So yeah, again I invite you to check out BookLive.com so you can actually perform all three of those steps in one simple sitting. Actually, I’ve seen people hiring musicians in under 5-minutes. Just all three of those steps in one session on BookLive.com. So check it out! And if you have any questions, feel free to message me or my team.
Visit BookLive at booklive.com
