I've been a musician all my life. I do expect to get paid for some performances, but not very often. If I'm asked to perform for an event, then I usually expect to get paid - you know, situations where there is a paying audience. But most of the time, I'm making music with people simply for the fun of making music, and I don't expect them to pay me. Or it's church services where I want everybody to sing, or it't our nursing home performances that we do as a service to the community.

I'm hoping to finally get to the San Francisco Free Folk Festival in June. I didn't volunteer, but no doubt I'll make a lot of music - and most of the volunteers are friends of mine. I'll enjoy making music with them, but nobody expects to get paid. There will be lots of people there who aren't members of the San Francisco Folk Music Club - we provide the festival for free to try to draw people in to the thrill of making their own music.

My son Nic has been a professional musician since he was about eighteen years old. It's his only profession, and he works very hard at it and spends a lot of money on equipment and transportation and recording and agents and whatnot. He doesn't make a whole lot of money, but he gets by. He performs for some fairly large audiences, all over the world. YouTube has some 24,000 videos of his band, but most of those are cellphone videos taken at concerts, and the band doesn't get paid for them. They show all the signs of being a reasonable successful band, but they don't make much money. Their biggest source of income comes from performing at festivals. Income from recordings is just so-so. Nic will lecture you for hours about the music business model, and what a mess it is. And yeah, Lizzie, Nic deserves to get paid well for what he does - but that's different from folk music. His music is music performed for an audience, not music that people make together.

-Joe-