As I see it, piano teachers have always struggled to some extent with making a livable wage, or at least with making a steady income. In recent years, many teachers have moved away from a pay-by-lesson model to a tuition model (pay by semester or in monthly installments for a year’s worth of lessons). This has helped alleviate the lean summer months and the time around the Christmas holidays when students tend to take fewer lessons due to vacations.
As for the livable wage, teachers can raise rates, offer group lessons, or supplement their piano teaching income in various ways:
- Raising rates can be helpful, but it still seems that a teacher will be tied to the reality of teaching 40+ students, which means 30-40 hours of contact time and an additional X amount of hours doing administrative work, professional development, etc. This approach has a limited earning potential when weighed against the fact that one teacher can only take so many individual students, particularly when working around one’s family life and responsibilities.
- Other teachers teach group lessons, which take various forms. One might teach buddy lessons, where two students come for a set period of time and each receives individual piano instruction while the other learns/practices music theory concepts on a computer. One might have access to multiple pianos or keyboards, and students work through the same curriculum while using headphones, with the teacher checking in now and again with different students. One might even manage a studio of teachers, where he/she gets a percentage of the profit from others teaching lessons for them. All of these situations have some limitations for the average piano teacher.
- Supplementing piano teaching income can happen in a variety of ways. Besides the obvious – having an outside job, related or unrelated – teachers can rely on a spouse to carry the rest of the financial burden, compose and sell music, teach online or create online courses, or create resources to sell to others.
This last option is one I’ve been mulling over the most recently. There is the lure of “passive” income, in which one can still be master over one’s time and schedule, and yet earn money. For the average piano teacher, this is appealing, especially as many happen to be mothers trying to balance the family’s needs, but it can seem hopelessly out of reach.
Think about what is required to develop this passive income: some business sense; skill in marketing and/or graphic design and/or skill with technology; an entrepreneurial mindset and drive to succeed. In my experience, these skills are largely missing in the average piano teacher, who probably has some amount of musical training in a very specific skillset (playing the piano) and values the human contact and individualized instruction that are a hallmark of teaching piano lessons at home.
There is a trade-off here. If one wants to succeed as a business owner, what is required is a measure of separation from physical contact with students. This is true for a teacher in any setting who wishes to “move up” in the profession and expand his/her reach. More students = less individualized instruction. This is true in the physical classroom and in the growing online platforms. Virtual lessons cannot accomplish the same artistry and attention to detail as in-person lessons. Worse, pre-recorded online lessons cannot assess an individual student’s strengths and weaknesses in order to tailor instruction. Going the other way, if a teacher becomes a manager of other teachers, or a business coach or teaching coach, or a conference speaker, he/she can indeed expand the number of students reached (as individuals, in a one-on-one lesson); however, this manager/coach/speaker is necessarily removed from private teaching as he/she delegates the responsibility to others.
The exception to this last point is the composer-creator, who manages to keep an active teaching studio and produce content that is worthy of sales. This teacher does not need to sacrifice students to do both. I would argue, however, that it is difficult to do both to a high standard, as both roles require a commitment of time and focus.
There is something necessary and human about individual, in-person lessons, that we are in danger of losing as our society is increasingly driven to go online. Whether by economic necessity or convenience, the temptation to put everything online or to “go virtual” is real. But students (and teachers!) need in-person interaction, focused attention, individualized instruction, collaboration, and all of the joys and struggles of saying “hello” and “how was your week” and “what can I help you with” and “I thought of you when I heard this song” and “your playing really touched me” and “why does this seem so difficult for you” and “what else can we try, in order for you to be successful.” We are so quickly losing human eye contact at the cash register, common decency in letting someone else go first at a four-way-stop, and the joy of experiencing live music in person together; the individual, in-person piano lesson is a necessary respite from the fast-paced, impersonal, online world.
This does not fully answer the question of “How to make money as a piano teacher,” but it does speak to the heart of the profession: what are we really trying to do? Creating musicians is an art, and art is not rushed or easily out-sourced. The arts speak to us as humans – there is a reason we call them the “humanities.” And what makes us human does not translate easily to the virtual world; it must remain in the physical world.
Keep up with my writing by subscribing to At Home with Classical Piano on Substack.