Pat and his twin brother Sean have over 700,000 followers and more than 100 million views on their mashup videos. That is more attention than almost any performer you know. So it would be reasonable to assume that audience is what fills their calendar.

It isn’t. Pat books about 45 weddings a year, charges up to $7,000 for a full day, and the wedding account he uses for that business has 290 followers. He barely touches it. On this week’s Coaches Corner, Matt sat down with Pat in person to find out where the bookings actually come from, how much time the business really takes, and why the followers have almost nothing to do with it.

Attention does not pay the bills

Matt asked the obvious question first. Does 100 million views pay the bills?

“No. It’s hard to monetize a lot of it, mainly because we’re using covers. We’re using other people’s songs.”

Mashups are derivative work. Releasing them means licensing both songs, and that gets expensive fast. So the content builds the brand, and the weddings pay for the life. Sit with that for a second if you are posting every day hoping the money follows the followers. Pat has the followers. It is still the private events that make the living, and those come through a completely different door.

Do the math, then charge it

Pat’s pricing philosophy fits in one sentence.

“Do the math. How much do you need to make? And that’s what you need to charge.”

He is blunt about the mindset that stops most performers.

“It’s not like, oh, I don’t know if I can value myself there. It’s more of, I need to live, and it’s fair for me to ask for what I need to live.”

Pat and Sean are doing fewer weddings than they used to on purpose. They charge more, so they can do less and spend the time on their music and their families. That is the whole point of getting the rate right.

An hour or two a day

Forty-five weddings sounds like a full calendar. Pat says the admin side is smaller than people think.

“It’s really just, like, an hour or two a day with the weddings, just to kind of water things and make sure I’m getting back to emails.”

Matt did the math on the call. Forty-five weddings is forty-five couples. Compare that to how many meetings a nine-to-five has in one week. Pat drops his kids at school and picks them up. He goes to the supermarket at 10 on a Tuesday when nobody is there. He batches weddings into ten-day blocks so the family can travel.

“Four weddings in a 10-day period, and that’s basically a full paycheck or more.”

Where the bookings really come from

This is the part of the episode to rewind. Pat and Sean used to pay $2,500 to $3,000 a year to the big wedding directories, the same places most performers assume they have to be. Then they started tracking where the bookings actually came from.

“It went from, like, 50% to then 60 and then 70, and I’m like, 80, why am I even paying $2,500 a year, $3,000 a year for this stuff when I don’t really need to? So we just cold stopped doing it, and then all of a sudden I realized, well, we didn’t really need to do that to begin with.”

The 80% was relationships. Venues and the other vendors in the room. Today about six venues rehire them every single year, and at least a quarter of their dates are still at places they have never played before, because those new places came through someone who had already seen them work.

Not the 700,000 followers. Not the directories. The people standing next to them at the last gig.

Matt’s take on the call:

“Advertising is important, especially when you’re new to the market. But when you do the math and you see what’s moved the needle, it’s relationships.”

And he has never sent a cold email to get there. Matt asked him straight: how many vendors and planners have you cold contacted?

“Zero. I have not.”

Pat’s version of networking is not a pitch. He calls it going around the back.

“Who are the people that I should know in this area? Who are these photographers? Just look at their work, start following them, and interact with their stuff. It’s okay to do that if you’re genuinely interested in what they’re doing. You don’t have to be annoying.”

“One day you might work with them, and they’re like, ‘This was fun to work with you. Maybe I’ll send some people your way.’ Instead of thinking cold call, like, ‘Could you recommend me to people?’ Why would they do that? They don’t know you.”

Matt added the reason it works. Every event you play puts you next to a photographer, a planner, and a venue manager for ten or twelve hours. The client comes first. After that, the job is to be a human.

“I don’t mean in some kind of cheesy networking way. Just be a human.”

When your price is low, people are fishing

Pat’s clients value music. That is not luck, it is a filter.

“When your price is low, people are just fishing for somebody that’s gonna meet a price point. Whereas when your price is a little bit higher, people that value what you’re doing say, ‘We really want to work with you,’ instead of, ‘I can’t afford that, I’ll go somewhere else.’”

The venues do part of the selling for him. A coordinator sits down with a couple, the couple asks who they should hire for music, and the answer comes back as a name, not a price range.

“Instead of them thinking, ‘How much do they cost?’ it’s, ‘I have to hire them because the venue said they want me to.’”

Pat estimates 98% of the couples who reach him this way are exactly the kind of client he wants to work with. Compare that to a stranger who found you scrolling.

The referral door

Matt closed the loop with a story from the other side of the table. He needed a photographer for family photos and, instead of searching online, texted a friend who runs a business in that town. He knew the recommendation would not be cheap and he was fine with it.

The friend’s referral was not available, so Matt ended up searching online and hired someone great for $500.

“She did an awesome job. She definitely is underpricing herself. But I was willing to pay three times more. When I came in as a stranger through cold traffic, I’m not really willing to spend that much. But when I come in this other door, I would’ve paid it.”

Same photographer. Same skill. The door she came through decided the price. That is the whole episode in one story, and it is why the system we teach puts relationships and referrals ahead of chasing strangers online.

“You get to decide what to do with the extra time”

Matt teased him about being a sellout. Pat did not flinch.

“You don’t have to be a starving artist. It’s okay if you do events. It doesn’t mean you sold out.”

“When you’re making that money, you then get to decide what to do with all that extra time.”

For Pat and Sean, that time goes into original music and the content that 700,000 people follow. The followers are the result of the wedding business, not the cause of it. The weddings run on relationships, not reach.

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Want the full system working musicians use to build a private event business that books itself? That’s exactly what we do inside Well Paid Musician.

Catch the full episode with Pat on Coaches Corner.