Contra Dance Pay and Inflation
post by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2025-03-05T02:40:03.100Z · LW · GW · 0 commentsContents
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Max Newman is a great contra dance musician, probably best known for playing guitar in the Stringrays, who recently wrote a piece on dance performer pay, partly prompted by my post last week. I'd recommend reading it and the comments for a bunch of interesting discussion of the tradeoffs involved in pay.
One part that jumped out at me, though, is his third point:
3) Real World Compensation is BehindRisking some generalizing and over-simplifying, any dance performer could tell you that over the past 10 (20!) years, the compensation numbers have been sticky, sometimes static. In real terms, compensation on the whole has not kept up with inflation.
This is quite important: if pay is decreasing in real terms then it's likely that the dance community is partly coasting off of past investment in talent and we shouldn't expect that to continue. Except when I look back over my own compensation, however, I don't see a decrease. For dance weekends, counting only weekends that included travel, my averages have been (in constant January 2025 dollars):
| Year | Mean | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | $600 | 2 |
| 2015 | $732 | 5 |
| 2016 | $804 | 5 |
| 2017 | $879 | 5 |
| 2018 | $798 | 3 |
| 2019 | $833 | 3 |
| 2022 | $831 | 2 |
| 2023 | $789 | 5 |
| 2024 | $893 | 3 |
I wouldn't put too much weight on the low numbers for 2014 and 2015: initially the Free Raisins weren't too sure what the going rates were and probably ended up a bit on the low side.
What about dances that aren't special events? My record keeping for evening dances isn't quite good enough to make these numbers easy to pull, but I do have good data for tours:
| Date | Mean | Count |
| 2012-08 | $165 | 7 |
| 2013-07 | $155 | 7 |
| 2014-07 | $189 | 11 |
| 2019-05 | $134 | 6 |
| 2024-02 | $192 | 6 |
| 2024-07 | $115 | 7 |
| 2025-02 | $226 | 4 |
One thing to keep in mind is that tour payments depend on where in the country you're touring, and are correlated. For example the 2024-07 tour was through a lower cost of living area (Rochester, Pittsburgh, Bloomington, St Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis) while the 2025-02 tour was the opposite (Baltimore, DC, Bethlehem, NYC). But here as well I don't see payment failing to keep up with inflation.
One more place I can look for data is what BIDA has been paying. The structure is a guarantee (the minimum performers are paid, regardless of what attendees do) and then a potential bonus (originally a share of profits, switching to an attendance bonus in 2023). Here's what I see, but keep in mind that these averages exclude some dances where there's missing data:
| Date | Mean actual pay, with bonuses | Guaranteed minimum pay |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | $115 | |
| 2010 | $152 | $109 |
| 2011 | $170 | $106 |
| 2012 | $140 | $104 |
| 2013 | $144 | $102 |
| 2014 | $140 | $100 |
| 2015 | $152 | $100 |
| 2016 | $145 | $99 |
| 2017 | $162 | $97 |
| 2018 | $145 | $126 |
| 2019 | $149 | $124 |
| 2022 | $161 | $107 |
| 2023 | $205 | $130 |
| 2024 | $244 | $152 |
Note again that all the dollar amounts in this post are (inflation-adjusted) January 2025 dollars.
This data isn't ideal, though, because it's telling the story of a dance that has been becoming increasingly popular over time. While I do think there's a component of higher pay leading to being able to attract better performers, leading to higher attendance, leading to higher pay, etc, the pay increases have mostly been responsive: realizing that things are going well and we're able to pay musicians more. [1]
I think what would be most illuminating here would be for performers to share their numbers: how have you seen things change over time?
[1] I was curious how much of the increased attendance has been
switching to booking
some established bands, but most of the increase predates that
booking change.
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