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The past couple of weeks have been quite busy as Dr. Wife and I began the arduous process of moving furniture, personal belongings, and various bits of bric-a-brac and knick-knackery to our new home.  As such, I’m playing a bit of catch-up with these subscriber-only posts.  Apologies for the frequent delays over the last few months, and thanks for sticking with me.  —TPP

Back on 20 December 2025 I wrote “Christmas Gigging,” an optimistic post about how fun, easy, and profitable Christmastime bookings are for musicians.  Christmas music abundantly available and instantly recognizable; it’s also fairly easy to learn a lot of it quickly.

I was booked to play saxophone at a Christmas party that night, way down in Summerville, South Carolina.  I’d booked the gig through GigSalad, one of several booking services available to musicians, birthday clowns, jugglers, comedians, and all the rest of us carny folk.  Over the years I’ve used the service, I’ve only closed 5.4% of all gigs I’ve quoted to clients (or 5 out of 93).  To be fair, I’ve received a whopping 776 leads over the years, which means I’m only sending quotes to just under 12% of the leads I actually received.

Many of those unquoted leads are due either to scheduling conflicts (lots of nursing homes booking during the day on weekdays, for example, or gigs too far away to make after work).  Some are instances of potential clients never responding to basic questions about their needs (I don’t like to send a quote for events like weddings, for example, without at least touching base with the client about what they want).  Still others—more than I’d like to admit—are simply me not responding until it’s too late.

Regardless, even with gigs that are quoted, the vast majority—well, 94.6%, as you can see—go unbooked.  Only a handful of those are because the client has booked another professional; they’re mostly due to people never responding to quotes at all—and most of those never even look at the quote (GigSalad indicates when a potential client has seen a quote and/or message).

But I digress.  I had a bout of good luck with GigSalad in December, managing to land two gigs within a week of each other.  The first client was very pleased—I played for his proposal to his girlfriend—and the client for the Christmas party seemed pretty eager for me to play.

I had a bit of a bad feeling about this gig.