How important do you think it is to equally contribute to any and all band expenses/investments? Studio time...merch...communal gear...production...CD's... What about less tangible things like promotion, ticket sales, draw at shows... Ideally it should be an even split, but is it reasonable to be mad if it isn't? If so, where do you draw line?
We basically split things four ways on things we all agree with. e.g. We all agreed we wanted physical copies of Horizons, so we spilt the bill. Sometimes someone wants to buy something for the band but everyone else doesn't seem to find that thing necessary at that time, so that person might pay for it themselves. Sometimes someone will pay the majority of something, but will eventually get paid back.
Meh, I think it depends on the person and the band, plus the variables Brooks mentioned. Like, in my band we try to make it all equal financially, but a few of just are better off and can more comfortably afford shit.
I think it's inevitable that the people who care less about the band end up paying less. You can try and rectify the situation by agreeing to split bills and things, but you're never going to get rid of it completely.
Equal is good, or more weight on one person can make sense if they are basically in charge of almost everything, including the band finances. In that situation it is sort of like that member is the owner and the other bandmates are employees.
With my recording project it's a little bit of everything mentioned so far. We split things that we both find equally important as we can, but I make less money than the other guy does, so he winds up pitching in more money. This has been lessened recently save for the investment to get Kevin Moore aboard out EP, but that was much more his dream than mine, and I wouldn't have shelled out half of Kev's fee anyway. Historically speaking, I've contributed less financially. On the other hand, though, since I've done the overwhelming majority of all audio engineering, I've had to pay way more for software and hardware than he has. Additionally, since I'm the vocalist/guitarist/bassist/additional keyboardist whereas he just plays the keys, my instrument costs are WAY higher than his (we both have basically the same keyboard, so everything after that is expensive of mine that he doesn't have), and I also wind up putting literally probably about 25x the amount of hours into the project. I'm not certain he'd agree, but we both have 50% say over things with our music, which I think is pretty well balanced by his higher monetary investment versus my higher time/energy investment. How should it be for other bands, though? It should be arranged so that everybody is comfortable and nobody is sitting atop an ever-growing mountain of seething resentment.
Well, everything we've made as a band as far as playing live and getting paid or from people buying the EP goes into a band fund. It's administrated by our bassist who is the most financially mature and stable person in the band and can be trusted with it. We work as a democracy to decide what we use the money on. We give things priority. We don't make enough to pay for the practice space with it, so we split that cost evenly. We've been saving up and we intend to use what we have currently to fund shirts and other merch. Pretty much as far as personal music equipment goes, each member is responsible for maintaining their instruments and gear. That just comes with the territory... We're all pretty good about it too.
