Why should you consider a cruise ship gig?
There are lots of good reasons but here’s the great thing about cruise ship gigs as compared to freelance work on land. A salary! A guaranteed salary, month-in and month-out. Let’s get this out of the way right now. If you are working well paying gigs every single night in a medium or large sized city, you’re probably not going to make that same amount of money on a cruise ship gig (gross, at least… net is a whole different story and we’ll get to that in a future post!).
BUT… if you are just working at the weekends, or doing occasional sub or dep work, or scrambling to pay the bills on a handful of gigs a month and a working a day job, then a salaried position with benefits on a cruise ship should be an attractive proposition to you. I know there’ll be many of you reading this who will be quite happy with the idea of being a starving artist, but not everyone is. I know of countless people I’ve met and worked with over the years who have done a 6 month ship contract and gone home with $10,000 saved in the bank. Could you make $10,000 in 6 months on land…? Of course you could. Could you actually save up $10,000 in 6 months on land while paying rent, car payments, gas, insurance, food and electricity bills? The chances are that if you’re a starving artist playing bar gigs for door money then the answer to that is probably no!
It’s not just the opportunity to save that’s great. There are lots of other benefits of being a musician on a cruise ship and I’ll get to them in a future post.
Finally, the other thing to keep in mind is that despite whatever preconceived notions you might have about cruise lines, they remain just about the largest employers of musicians on the planet. Our biggest client employs over 500 musicians full time with some of their ships having over 30 full time professional musician positions; ie far more than most theatre shows on land.