Us musicians often have a funny relationship with money. Wanting to make money somehow seems at odds with our creative mindset. It seems like selling out or not being true to our art. Aren’t we supposed to suffer for our art rather than make decent money and live a comfortable life?

In all honesty that’s a pretty idealistic view that soon gets replaced by reality when people realise that the world doesn’t share that view and the bills are piling up.

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And on the contrary, if music doesn’t make us money then we need to earn money elsewhere and that takes us away from music.

So if you are asking, “How much does a drum teacher make?” then you are thinking the right way.

You must treat music as a business if you want any chance of making it your business. It doesn’t matter how much talent, passion, creative genius or God given destiny you might have, without a business approach you won’t make money and will soon find your self applying for a job at MacDonald’s to pay the bills.

If you want to become a drum teacher then you can make a good amount of money doing something you love and still have lots of spare time to record, gig and practice your drums.

What is a drum teachers salary?

A drum teachers salary is not something we often talk about because only a small set of musicians earn a salary. Most musicians, including drum teachers, are self employed and don’t have the luxury of a salary that they can rely on.

There are plenty of music teacher positions that offer a salary in schools, colleges and universities but less so for drum teachers. This type of job will only exist in higher education specialist music facilities and the drum teachers they employ will have a high level of music education and a well earned reputation in the professional field.

So what we are focusing here is on private drum teachers.

You might also be interested to read what qualifications a drum teacher needs.

How much do private drum teachers make?

 OK so the question, “How much do private drum teachers earn?” is an easier one to answer. The reason is that all we really need to know is how much can a drum teacher earn per hour. What is a drum teachers hourly rate?

Once we have established that we can determine how much a drum teacher can earn in a year by scaling it up. But the important thing to appreciate here is that you are now in control. When you are employed you are told what you earn. Here you can determine how many students you want to teach and therefore how much you can earn.

What is a drum teacher hourly rate?

This largely depends on where you are based. However, the hourly rate is usually relative to the cost of living in your area so the earning potentially is similar.

Let’s focus on the UK rate in 2019. The Musician’s Union sets the national suggested private drum teaching rate at £34 per hour. That means you can confidently charge that rate and explain to students that it is the suggested union rate.

If you are a new, inexperienced teacher in a less affluent area then you could always consider going lower to boost your teaching roster. However, a large part of running a successful drum teaching business is understanding how to position yourself in the market.

If you charge a lower amount your devalue the perception of your service and you might attract the less desirable students who are less willing to really work towards progress.

Often it is a better strategy to offer the most professional service you can and market yourself as someone who provides more than your competitors in the area. That attracts better students and allows you to charge the top rate in your area.

How much does a drum teacher earn in a year?

But let’s use that MU suggested rate and scale things up. If we are charging £34 per hour and we work for 20 hours per week then we would gross £680 per week.

If we multiply that by 52 weeks then a drum teacher could earn £35,360 per year. Obviously this doesn’t take into account holidays and sick days. But it could also be higher because you might have other income such as gigs, school teaching, recording sessions, etc. And don’t forget that this is for working only 20 hours a week when a regular full time job is often around the 40 hours a week mark.

The average UK wage is somewhere slightly over the £25k per year mark so for you to have the potential to earn way above that, working half the hours and doing something you love means that this really isn’t a bad option.

If you want to learn all the strategies to earn money from music then you might like this course called How to make money from music. And here is an article that shows how to survive as a musician by diversifying.

Do you want to be a drum teacher?

Starting a business seems scary right?

And that’s OK because it is a big step. The benefits are worth it: You are your own boss, you use your passion as your job, you make a positive impact on people’s lives, you work when you want, you earn as much or little as you want. But it’s a scary prospect at first and there’s a lot to think about.

And that’s why we created the totally free How to become a drum teacher business start up guide. It helps you set up the right mindset and then gives you tips on how to market the business, set up finances, prepare your teaching space, sort the finances side of business out and much more.

If you’re ready to do this properly then let’s do it.

If you want a simple action then click here to join the FREE drum teacher training that will make the whole process much clearer for you.