Explore the nuanced dynamics of charging friends for professional services from the perspective of an audio engineer. This response blog delves into the challenges and rewards of merging friendship with business, offering insights on setting boundaries, valuing expertise, and maintaining healthy reciprocity in the music industry.

You have a moral obligation to protect all members of the concert experience. From musicians on stage to the six-year-old kid in the last row, you, as the A1, have sole control over the output of the main speakers. Having listening levels that are too loud and produce hearing damage over exposure time means you morally failed part of the concert-going experience. As a professional, you are obligated to educate yourself, understand the limits of your system and human anatomy and figure out a way to deliver the best SAFE concert experience to all involved.

Fans have long feared the nightmare scenario: being shut out of their favorite concert because Ticketmaster has used dynamic Pricing to increase prices. According to a recent article, this happened to many concertgoers when tickets went on sale for an upcoming Bruce Springsteen tour. As demand increased, the price of tickets skyrocketed, with some seats costing as much as $5,500! But the real reason for dynamic Pricing is to reduce the secondary market and to increase revenue. Suppose the secondary market sells a ticket to an event for six times the face value. As the world starts to emerge from the pandemic, concert venues are filling up. But, ticketmaster’s alienating of fans in a post-COVID-19 market is leaving artists with little recourse and difficult decisions about how to best serve their fans.

Internships are not free labor. Internships are supposed to be for educational purposes and extension of the classroom. An intern should be at a facility to experience the day-to-day operations of how to do a job. Interns should not be roadies, coffee baristas, servers, and janitors.