How much should working musicians pay themselves?

Gig money, royalties, merch, and teaching, none of it on a schedule. The math below uses The Wren Sessions, the demo musician inside Counsel.

Guide · Brandon Grutkowski ·

02 / The guide
The worked example

The Wren Sessions, a working musician, runs a 58% margin and clears a median $1,450 a month after every cost. Its worst honest month is $300. With $9,400 in the bank against $2,250 of monthly burn, it holds 4.2 months of runway.

The safe draw sits at or below the $1,450 median, with a written answer for how a $300 month gets bridged. A draw set above the median here would quietly spend the runway one month at a time.

The method, plainly

Median of the last 6 to 8 months of profit as the ceiling; worst honest month as the floor; cash runway as the referee. The full method, including how to compute it by hand in ten minutes, is in the main pay-yourself guide, and the calculator sorts your months for you.

What is specific to working musicians

The $1,450 to $300 spread above is the honest picture of creative income: the floor is the number that plans your life. Set fixed personal costs against the floor, let everything above it accumulate toward runway, and the feast months stop being a trap.

03 / Keep reading
  1. 01How much should you pay yourself from your small business?
  2. 02Pay yourself calculator: median and worst honest month
  3. 03How many months of cash does your business actually have?
04 / Counsel

Counsel does this math on your real numbers.

Connect Square, Stripe, Shopify, Etsy, QuickBooks, or your bank. Every answer carries a receipt: the method, the sample size, and the confidence. When the math is not conclusive, it says so.

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Counsel's rule, applied to its own content: every figure above is computed, sourced from our demo businesses or your own inputs, never invented. This is cash math, not tax or legal advice. Written and maintained by the founder.