Music Directors and Composers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Music Directors and Composers worker at that point in the distribution, so $96,590 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 12,330, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 2,410 jobs; the top three states sum to 38.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Rhode Island posts a location quotient of 4.03, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $34,990 or less, and one in ten earns $157,010 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 4.5 to 1 and the annual gap is $122,020. The mean ($84,230) versus median ($63,670) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 38 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Connecticut at $91,810; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Music Directors and Composers stands number 656 by employment and number 350 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations, the group median wage is $66,220 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 4% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 11 of the 32 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $63,670, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 1,160 jobs, 9.4% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 58 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $103,600 a year, against $124,070 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $63,670 a year is $5,306 a month gross, $2,449 every two weeks, $1,224 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,330) to the 75th ($96,590) is worth $49,260 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $5,306 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $70,037 would sit between the median ($63,670) and the 75th percentile ($96,590), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,330, is $16,340 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

Sibling occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations: Coaches and Scouts, Graphic Designers, Merchandise Displayers and Window Trimmers, Producers and Directors, Editors, Audio and Video Technicians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.