How Much is Your Time Worth?

Well then. Come on. How much? And who sets this price? Are you involved in the determination? I recently finished up a draft of a short book about ‘value’. It explores how it’s created, stored, transferred, determined, etc. I’ll add a link when it’s published, but you’ll be getting some free insight from it reiterated here today.

Value is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “worth in usefulness or importance to the possessor” and I extend that to all people as someone who is not the possessor can gauge value although usually with a different perspective comes the possibility of a different determined worth. Understanding this bit alone as a independent musician (or anyone) fully is another huge chunk of the area(s) needed to be considered when analyzing the full spectrum of one’s career and business and arguably life. To make things simple, lets look at 3 categories of people who determine value:

1. You. Yes, you can decide all by yourself how much you’re willing to sell your time or your CD. While a company like Spotify or the US government courts might decide things like how much you get from a stream, YOU really don’t have to do what they say. For now, you could sell your downloadable tracks for $5 each or whatever you want. Except for…
2. Other people. You can’t force people to give you what you want. The US courts and most around the world are being used to enforce laws that force some people to pay certain amounts, but that’s if they choose to buy in the first place. Without getting deep into that cesspool, I’m gonna focus this spotlight on consumers directly. Your fans. They often decide how much value you provide even besides things like “Pay-What-You-Want” setups, people’s value they have in their own minds drive a free market which brings us to…
3. The marketplace. And here we have a mix of what you believe the value of something like your CD is and what other people believe the value of your CD is. The point where they meet is called the “market price” and this is where the sale gets made.

You might be at a point in your career whether in time or just in knowledge, that your market price might only be 2 beers from the bar for a two hour performance, but then again it might be at $10,000 for single song show appearance or maybe you can get $1 million dollars just for a verse. There’s such a wide range. What I hope you get out of this is that YOU CAN HAVE A PART IN THE PRICE. Remember that. Don’t just let other people decide your price. Maybe you’re at a point where you don’t know your own worth and that’s a hard place to be, but you’ve got to step up and make some friends, make some mistakes, learn from those who’s judgement you respect, and figure it out. I talk about this more in the book, but also know that your value is dynamic. It can change and, sometimes, very quickly at that. It also doesn’t only mean monetary value, although that steps deeper as well which is also talked about it the book.

All that said, your personal value as a person, human being, musician, whatever is related to but doesn’t technically exactly define the value of your time. This is another multi-layered topic that I don’t have time to explain here however the idea here is that while your time might be worth $50/hr that doesn’t mean YOU are worth $50/hr.

If you want to talk about your time’s or product’s monetary value give me shout. We can look at several aspects of the whole that is you and breakdown external factors as well. Then we can talk about how, if you want, to change your value.