It’s a long held myth that wedding musicians only work at weekends in the summer. Probably, not so many years ago, it was more the norm to have a wedding on a Saturday. This was also when church weddings were far more prolific than they are nowadays and the majority of people were at a place of work between the hours of 9-5 on a weekday.
However, times have changed. Increasingly more and more people are working from home, church weddings are now few and far between and the rise of the ‘wedding venue’ has meant that the wedding industry is now firmly a 7 day a week operation. This concept of course is in fact not that new, and many barn or similar style wedding venues have been in business for ten or twenty years in some cases.
What this means for everyone in the wedding industry, is that nowadays it is most definitely a 7 day a week 364 day a year operation. So far, we haven’t played for a wedding on Christmas Day, but certainly we have on just about every other day of the year at some point.
Of course, the business is still seasonal. Most suppliers would agree that June, July and August is very much peak season. If you find yourself at a wedding on just about every single day in August, then business is definitely going in the right direction.
At JAM Duo we are fortunate enough to always find ourselves extremely busy through the Summer and spend most of the time driving around the country playing at back to back weddings. Whilst this can be hard work, we absolutely love it and certainly wouldn’t change this for anything. The trade off is that in January and February we probably have an average of 2-3 weddings a week which then gives us plenty of time to re-energise.
But of course, like anyone running their own business, it’s not all downtime and the chance to go on holiday. As well as playing at weddings we like to record lots of music in our studio which we then publish so our prospective couples can not only hear us play, but also to give them inspiration when choosing music for their own wedding. The feedback we get from couples is that our recorded music is an invaluable resource when they are choosing their music, whether that be the bridal entrance or songs to entertain guests during the reception.
This inspires us to keep recording new tracks to constantly refresh our playlists and also keep up to date with new trends or newly released songs. By publishing our music online and then promoting it to our client base, as well as providing inspiration we can also see what tracks are popular and which ones less so.
You can hear our latest recordings by heading over to our listen page. We also like to publish the new recordings over on our socials, particularly on our Instagram and Facebook pages.
As for downtime, we have also enjoyed the chance to have a few days off here and there throughout the first few weeks of the year. Back in November we also moved house – again this was carefully timed to not be in our busiest season. For the last few weeks we have mostly been at weddings or wielding a paintbrush in our new (well 19th century) barn. With the barn now mostly sorted, and with our brand new recording studio up and running we are really looking forward to being busy through the rest of the year and meetings lots of fabulous couples as we provide daytime music for their weddings.
As part of our ongoing bid to generate new business we have recently created a new advert which you will see populating over on our social media channels. Again this is something which we enjoy doing and we like to create new flyers and graphics for our marketing every few weeks in a bid to keep a fresh approach and attract new couples to our business offering.
It’s fair to say that being busy in the wedding industry does mean that you spend a lot of time ‘working’. But for us, because we love what we do, and yes I know that sounds like a cliche, but we genuinely do, none of this feels like work. Weddings, to us, are a way of life and also a privilege to be part of. And so long as we always keep in mind just how lucky we are to be part of so many fabulous occasions and we are prepared to put the work in, we plan to keep being busy for many years to come.
