So I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is a club DJ. He was giving me all sorts of shit about the price we charge for mobile DJ work. Then I reminded him of a few things. First off we have to bring the club to basically wherever the client want's us. We don't have the luxury of just showing up and playing music. We actually have to pay insurance to protect our equipment, insurance for the transport vehicle (A commercial policy at that) and it's not cheap, upkeep on equipment that constantly gets bumped around because of all the movement in transport, music, etc, etc. I reminded him that we may book this out at $250 an hour whereas he may be getting that for an entire evening if he is lucky but there are a few differences in the two types of gigs. Let's take a look...
Packing, Transport, Setup, Play, Tear Down, Transport, Unpacking...
I just outlined what we do as mobile DJ's. Some of us don't have to pack and unpack their rigs but sometimes this can add substantial time to what we do. If I play an 8PM-11PM show that's 3 hours of play time. If I charge $750 for this as an example we can now look into the typical time and preparation required to do a mobile show.
Let's assume it's an hour to the event and back. So if I have a show at 8PM the absolute latest I can arrive is 6PM. My setup time is an hour but I also build in time in the event that a piece of equipment may have a problem and need replaced so I allow myself extra time, plus you never know what you may run into during the setup. So if I leave at 5PM and play the gig I finish up around 11PM. I can usually tear the show down in about an hour and get it packed and I would probably be back by 1AM. So lets look at the number of hours involved. We are looking at around 8 hours for the show. So if I break it down that's $93.75 per hour. Now lets look a the other things required to pull off the show successfully. First we need music. My monthly music subscription is $120 per month. So if I break this down and charge it back to the client based on 8 gigs a month that's $15 out of my pocket. My insurance for the vehicle and equipment is $250 per month so broken down that's $31.25 in expenses. And then throw in about $10 for gas as well as $20 for food and misc expenses and you can see quickly that the hourly rate is much lower than where we started.
So we are right around $84 per hour. If I have any help to setup (which you always have) then you are farther cutting into your profits. So say I pay somebody $20 an hour to help me setup and tear down and transport now we are at $64 per hour.
Guess what club DJ. After I pay my taxes your making more hourly than I am.
Maximizing Profits in Mobile Entertainment
So as you can see there is not much money in the mobile DJ business. The only way to succeed in this space is to add value added services such as monograms, special effects and other types of entertainment. The key to profits is to combine services and don't lock yourself into a particular box when designing your mobile entertainment offerings.
Just wanted to put this out there. There is not much money in mobile DJ work. It's work to make money folks!
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