shatterkiss
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 p.1 #2 · info from Pro Music photographers | |
Honestly, when it comes to making money by shooting for the music industry, I'd bypass shooting concerts and performances and go straight to shooting album and tour publicity images for bands and labels. I suspect I made more money from 25 publicity shoots as I did from 6 years of concert photography, including stuff published in marquee magazines.
Shooting publicity images will mean spending more time developing relationships with labels, managers and publicists, building a solid book as a portraitist and having access to decent lighting equipment, stylists and locations. But you're doing commissioned shoots, which means you know you're being paid. Concert photography often becomes about spending time getting access and credentials, shooting, then hustling all over trying to sell what you've already shot. Beyond that, I've seen a steadily declining market for performance images - even old mainstays like Rolling Stone, Hit Parader, Kerrang and NME are only using a couple of concert shots per issue now, often at rates as low as $75/each for the initial publication. Concert photography is a LOT of fun, but I've never seen it be terribly lucrative except for a handful of high-profile shooters. I know that some shooters have been able to strike deals with regional venues as the "house photographer", but those are often fairly minor - $150/night and the house keeps the ability to use the resulting images however they like.
My most lucrative times of the year were traveling to shoot festivals, like SXSW and Gannett and CMJ. I'd make the rounds in the month or so beforehand, polling editors at publications about what bands they might be preparing to cover and would want images of, or the same of writers who were already hired and were also going out...then I'd attend those shows first, the bands I wanted to see second. Often I'd email proofs of last night's shows to those folks the next morning, hoping to be the first in line with my hand out. I'd also make myself available to shoot sit-downs and portrait setups with bands during the daytime to accompany interview pieces, and I'd shoot every private party and after-party I could get myself into...mags like Maxim, Spin, Details usually have some presence there and do puff-pieces to satisfy their party sponsors. I would generally get one publication to get my passes and creds issued as freebies in exchange for my promising to cover certain sets, then I'd pay my own travel expenses and hope for the best. Usually it was profitable, once or twice I only broke even.
You can certainly do both, of course. But I think there's a lot more opportunity as a portraitist that specializes in music performers vs. one of the schlubs in the press pit with his belly to the subs for three songs. The latter is a constant hustle, and it wore me out after a while. There's a reason why, at least in NYC and LA, most of the people in the pit are under the age of 25.
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