Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

When Kirk Kenney and I played our first paying gig together as the Hutong Yellow Weasels, we received 2,000 yuan ($320) each for entertaining a room of rich Chinese people interested in emigrating with their fortunes to Cyprus.

That has turned out to be the best-paying gig we ever had. We shared the bill with a magician doing card tricks and a children's choir.

Making money as a musician has never been easy. The problem with music - or any field that people have a passion for, be it journalism, comedy or art - is that many people are willing to do it for free.

For example, we played a very successful show at the opening of a local restaurant, and were paid a fair rate for it. The owners and managers said they wanted us back, and some tentative dates were penciled in. But the gigs never happened. Why? One reason is that another local band agreed to play for free food and drinks.

In China, playing on the street is often more lucrative than playing in a bar - especially if you charge a fee for people to have their picture taken with you, or have CDs to sell.

Noting that people on the street are happy to give money for music, we recently tried to follow through with this logic, and passed around a hat at a local show we played at a popular venue that does not charge for tickets. In Canada when my uncle's rock band played a gig, this was the norm, and people chipped in generously. Beijing is not Canada, of course, and we collected less than 200 yuan from a crowd of about 50 people - an average of 4 yuan from each customer. That also works out to 40 yuan a musician for a 2-hour show.

Prestigious or cool music bars are among our worst paying gigs, while restaurants and bars hiring us as essentially background music pay the best. In a similar vein, we were recently booked by two music festivals. One is full of musicians we admire and respect that we are thrilled to be a part of. It is paying zero, to any of the acts. The other is a corporate upstart, and pays almost as well as our first gig - even better if you include the travel expenses.

The Hutong Yellow Weasels are already on iTunes, and we are on Spotify as well, but as has been well documented, we would need about 100 million plays (no exaggeration) on Spotify to make a middle class wage. As for iTunes, even my sister hasn't bought my CD yet. I think she is expecting me to give her one.

In this era where people are accustomed to getting music for free, our band's only hope seems to be to sell the image and flavor we represent, and hope our music gets picked up by a corporation.

For the future, we are focusing less on playing live, and more on developing our band as a brand. Our brilliant caller Nathan Paul has designed a square dance modeled after the Game of Thrones "Red Wedding" episode, complete with a golden crown, cardboard swords and a dance move where you swing your partner round and round then slit their throat. We are hoping the video goes viral, followed by a reality TV show. Entertainment is where the money is.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.