Business Smarts: Revenue Streams

We’re continuing with our post-discussion thoughts on Zulu Gremlin’s business smarts class at Culture Shock LA’s H4 2010. Today, we’re pondering the issue of revenue streams for street dancers. It’s not a secret that we need money to survive in this tough economy. For most dancers, earning cash from our passion isn’t considered a steady income. So what do we do? How do we survive? This is where Grem talked about identifying the viable revenue streams and realigning our lifestyle to target them.

After a dancer gets major media exposure, the three most popular sources of revenue are performances, endorsements, and education. You can quickly get hired to perform at showcases and concerts. Clothing, shoe designers, and product companies will want you to act as spokesmodels for their wares. And there will be interested dance students who will want to pay to learn from you in a class setting. These three areas should be high priorities for a street dancer who wants to earn income after media exposure.

But after time, these revenue areas may become more infrequent. So this is where residual income is relevant. If a dancer has the opportunity to negotiate points or fees from participating in a film, television show, or music performance then residual income will maintain a cash flow over several years. This is key since being a professional dancer is essentially a freelance career. It’s rarely a nine-to-five job, five days a week. When you look at high profile film directors and actors, residual income plays a big role in their payoff. Film and television writers know this as well as seen in the writer’s strikes that happened in 2007 for the Writer’s Guild of America.

What Grem encouraged in his discussion is for us to start thinking proactively about these revenue streams. We must realize that there is no one single source of income that can support a professional dancer in the current state of the industry. So we have to have a multi-pronged strategy. That shouldn’t be hard for a young generation that is adept at multi-tasking. We just have to focus.