There are at least four different answers to this question depending on which working musician in Nashville you ask.
The Broadway Musician
This is the most visible working musician in Nashville and the furthest from the music industry’s commercial center. The honky-tonk musician on Lower Broadway plays 4-6 hours a day, six or seven days a week, to tourists who are on vacation and tipping when they feel like it. Tips are the entire compensation, no salary, no guarantee, no union scale.
On a good weekend night, a strong performer at a major venue might pull $150-$200 in tips. On a slow Tuesday, that number might be $30. The sets are continuous and the repertoire is whatever the crowd wants, which means four decades of country radio and whatever is charting now. The musicians are skilled, you can’t hold a room on Broadway for six hours without serious chops, but the work has more in common with bartending than recording.
Broadway musicians often use this circuit as income while pursuing other music goals: session work, original music, songwriting. Some stay on Broadway for years. Most are there temporarily.
The Session Musician
Nashville’s session musician community (the people who get called to play on professional recordings) is one of the most skilled and competitive in the world. The old “Nashville A-Team” system of the same 8-10 musicians on every record has evolved, but session work still exists and still pays well for those who break in.
Session scale as of recent years runs roughly $350-$500 per three-hour session through union agreements, though non-union sessions exist at various rates. A musician doing consistent session work can make a professional living. The barrier is being known and trusted by producers and artists who book sessions, which requires years of building relationships in Nashville’s music community.
The modern session landscape has been complicated by advances in home recording. Producers can now build complex tracks without hiring musicians for studio time, and many do. Live session work is less common than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, though it still exists.
The Touring Musician
Touring musicians play behind artists on the road, often earning a weekly or per-show guarantee plus per diem. Pay varies enormously: a musician touring with a major act might earn $1,500-$3,000 per week. A musician on a smaller circuit might earn $500-$800.
Nashville is where touring musicians live and get hired. The city is a hub not because touring originates here, but because the people who hire touring musicians (managers, agents, artists) are here, and networking happens locally.
The Songwriter-Performer
The songwriter trying to develop an original music career in Nashville operates on a different track. This person is writing songs, playing showcases, trying to get cuts on other people’s records or develop their own recording career, and usually supplementing income from some combination of the above options.
The economics are difficult. Most Nashville songwriters cannot live entirely on songwriting income. They teach lessons, do session work, play Broadway, take publishing draws, wait tables, or have other sources of income while their music career develops. The writers who eventually achieve commercial success often spent five to ten years in this mode before anything significant broke.
NSAI’s research has shown that even among writers who have had charting songs, a significant percentage earn less than $30,000 per year from music. The streaming economy has compressed publishing royalties that once sustained mid-tier songwriters.
What Nashville Offers That Other Cities Don’t
Despite these realities, Nashville remains the most concentrated market for music career development in the United States. The density of publishers, labels, producers, managers, and booking agencies within a small geographic area means that relationships form faster here than anywhere else.
A musician who moves to Nashville, works hard, builds genuine relationships, and maintains professional standards has a realistic shot at a sustainable music career. The same musician in a different city has a significantly harder path.
The city also has genuine community. The Nashville music world is small enough that people know each other, and the culture of collaboration, co-writing, session work, touring bands, means that musicians help each other in ways that don’t happen in more competitive environments.
Sources
- Nashville Songwriters Association International, nashvillesongwriters.com
- American Federation of Musicians Local 257 Nashville
- MusicRow Magazine, musicrow.com
- NASHtoday industry reporting