What to charge. What to budget. Live market data, free for everyone.
Independent figures from the largest survey of UK musicians ever conducted — and the reason this Index exists.
Source: Musicians’ Census (Help Musicians UK & the Musicians’ Union, ~6,000 respondents).
Pick your role, answer three questions. We'll show you where the market sits.
Every cell, every city. Click a tile to load it into the calculator. Colour shows where on the price curve each cell sits.
Nine sources, a strict quality firewall, weighted percentiles, and regional price adjustments — refreshed daily.
Real bookings on GIGXCHANGE, Musicians' Union and Equity published rates, public agency rate cards (Encore, Alive Network), venue gig budgets, artist profile asking rates, scraped editorial and anonymous public submissions — all funnelled into one observations table with documented provenance.
Every row passes a five-gate firewall before ingest: required fields, source whitelist, artist-fee only (ticket prices and licensing are banned), plausibility bounds per musician per hour, and dedup. Anything rejected is logged for audit, not silently dropped.
Each observation carries weight × confidence — real bookings count 1.00, agency rate cards 0.48, asking prices 0.16. Percentiles (p25 / p50 / p75 / p90) are weighted, then rolled into cells at three scopes: canonical city → ONS region → UK baseline, with regional economic multipliers filling thin gaps.
Same cell, different copy per role — artists see a charging recommendation; venues, agents and promoters see a budget. Cells rebuild daily at 05:00 UTC from the previous day's ingests.
Artists, venues, agents, promoters — every booking you've done is a data point the whole market needs. Three anonymous submissions unlocks every percentile and trend for 30 days. No email required.
One booking, 30 seconds. City, gig type, band size, fee. Anonymous and rate-limited. Whether you're the act, the buyer or the broker — your data point makes everyone's pricing decisions sharper.
Submit a rateA complete description of the data acquisition, weighting and aggregation framework underpinning every published cell.
The Index covers the United Kingdom only. A cell is defined by the cross-product of three dimensions: geography (one of three scopes — canonical city, ONS statistical region, or UK national baseline), use case (seven engagement categories: wedding, corporate, private party, pubs & bars, club, festival, theatre), and band size (bucketed: solo, duo, trio/quartet, five-plus). Each cell publishes percentile statistics — the 25th, 50th (median), 75th and 90th percentiles of weighted observations resident in the cell. The Index is median-based throughout; no arithmetic mean is computed or published.
The Index ingests observations from nine source classes, each with documented provenance and a deterministic reference identifier enabling idempotent re-ingestion: confirmed booking transactions on the GigXchange platform; post-event-verified user submissions; Musicians' Union and Equity published rates (annually refreshed); public agency rate cards (scraped weekly from Encore Musicians and Alive Network); scraped editorial cost-explainer articles; artist profile self-declared min_fee/max_fee; venue gig-budget declarations; anonymous public submissions (pending review); and forum observations (reserved). Every row additionally carries descriptive metadata — source channel, market segment, band type, venue hint and genre hint — from which the use case is derived at ingest rather than forced.
To reflect the differing reliability of source classes, every observation carries a composite weight w × c, where w is the source weight and c is a per-observation confidence factor. Percentile aggregation is weighted: each observation is replicated in proportion to w × c prior to percentile computation, so higher-trust sources exercise proportionally greater influence on published medians.
| Source class | w × c | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmed booking | 1.00 | Cleared transaction; strongest signal |
| Post-event-verified submission | 0.85 | User-reported, subsequently confirmed |
| MU / Equity published rate | 0.60 | Authoritative floor, not market-clearing |
| Agency published rate card | 0.48 | Asking price; includes agency commission |
| Venue gig budget | 0.25 | Pre-negotiation target, not transacted |
| Anonymous / unverified submission | 0.16 | Pending review; low intrinsic signal |
| Artist profile asking rate | 0.16 | Self-declared; weakly correlated to transactions |
Cells publish at three scopes: canonical city (20 major UK population centres; raw city slugs are normalised via a mapping function — e.g. Hove → Brighton, Oldbury → Birmingham); ONS region (twelve Standard Statistical Regions); and UK national baseline. City and region cells publish when n ≥ 3; UK baselines publish from n ≥ 1. At lookup time a three-step fallback applies: if a canonical city cell exists it is used directly; if not, the containing region is consulted; if the region is also thin, the UK baseline is returned. Percentile estimates use linear interpolation (percentile_cont) rather than nearest-rank, to avoid discretisation artefacts at small sample sizes.
When a lookup falls back to the UK baseline and the user's region is known, a regional multiplier is applied to adjust the published percentile toward that region's market conditions. Multipliers are derived from a source-weighted blend of ONS Regional Gross Disposable Household Income (2023), ONS Family Spending Survey recreation-and-culture expenditure shares, and industry surveys (Alive Network 2026 wedding-band regional price table; Bark.com regional averages). Weighting differs by use case — wedding engagements are 100% industry-anchored (aspirational spend does not track regional income linearly), corporate engagements are 85% ONS GDHI (corporate budgets do), while pubs & bars multipliers are heavily damped toward uniform (local venue cost structures dominate). Observed city or region data always takes precedence; multipliers only fill otherwise-empty fallback slots.
A single ingest function (ingest_idx_observations) enforces five gates on every incoming row: required-field presence, source whitelist, payment-type restriction (only artist fees permitted — ticket prices, licensing fees, equipment hire and door splits are rejected by database-level CHECK constraint), plausibility bounds (per musician per hour, defined per use case), and duplicate detection. Rejections are logged with reason and raw payload for audit. Ticketed-club engagements additionally model revenue economics — guarantee, venue capacity, ticket price and revenue split are captured where available, and expected fee is computed as max(guarantee, capacity × ticket × sellout × split) with a 65% sellout baseline. Anonymous contributions are subject to a database-level rate limit and are held in a pending-review queue until administrator action.
Cells are rebuilt nightly at 05:00 UTC via a scheduled job that re-runs the full weighted aggregation. Agency rate cards refresh weekly (Monday 03:00 UTC); approved public submissions propagate daily (04:30 UTC). Snapshot sources (rate cards, profile rates) use ISO-week-bucketed reference identifiers, so weekly observations accumulate as a time series rather than overwriting prior values — enabling rate-drift analysis over time. Each published cell exposes its last_refreshed timestamp and its resident sample size.
The GigXchange Index is a historical observation of fees that have been charged, asked or budgeted in the UK live music market. It is not a recommended price, a regulated benchmark, nor financial advice. Fees in any individual engagement may legitimately fall outside any percentile shown.
Published free of charge under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Derivative use is permitted with attribution to GigXchange Index, https://gigxchange.app/rates/.