Life as a Cruise Ship Musician: Six Months at Sea
I recorded this podcast sitting at my desk in a cabin I could cross in five steps, somewhere between the Canary Islands and Madeira, five months into a six-month cruise ship musician contract. I was tired. You'll probably be able to hear it.
But if your wondering what life as a cruise ship musician really looks like, the thing you actually need is the honest version. Not the highlight reel. So here it is.
A quick heads up before we get into it: this episode covers alcohol, drugs, sex, worker abuse, sexual abuse, and racism. Not gratuitously. Just honestly. If you want the real picture of what working as a musician on a ship looks like, that means not skipping the hard parts.
Getting on board
Before you start working as a musician on a cruise ship, there's paperwork. A lot of it.
You'll need your STCW certifications (the international convention on Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping for seafarers) – a series of maritime safety trainings covering things like firefighting, basic CPR, and crowd management, completed on land at a seafarers' school. They can be fairly expensive, though sometimes reimbursed. You'll need a medical clearance, which involves more blood tests than seems reasonable – last time they took six vials from me. Drug tests before you board, and then randomly throughout your contract. A Passport, and Visas, depending on where the ship sails and what passport you're carrying. I'm a US citizen, which meant I couldn't get off in Russia or China. Nothing personal – just international relations and politics.
My advice: don't start any of this until you have the gig. No sense spending money on STCWs before you know you need them.
Where you actually live
The cabin. Let me paint you a picture...
I can cover the whole thing in about five steps. There's a small desk with a phone – internal to the ship only – a bunk bed (I was on top, which means a couple of inches less headroom and a curtain for privacy), a tiny individual closet, a small personal safe, a tiny bathroom with a shower just large enough to stand in, and a fridge we weren't technically supposed to use for perishable food. We used it as a beer fridge. We were lucky because ours actually worked.
You share all of this with a roommate. Different schedules, different hours, different habits. You make it work. The one rule is don't be an ass about it. I use a collapsible duffel bag instead of a hard suitcase specifically because real estate is in short supply – any extra inches you're not filling with something bulky matters more than you'd think.
Don't drink the tap water. Seriously. There are a lot of chemicals in it. I had a colleague spending over $50 a month just on bottled water to wash her face. You buy it from the crew bar and it comes out of your pay at the end of the month – same as anything else you charge on board.
The food comes from the crew mess. Specific times for each meal, a couple of hours per window. This ship had pretty good food. Not all of them do.
The internet problem
The internet is terrible and expensive. Guests get a good connection. Crew get a throttled version and usually have to pay for it. On a previous contract I paid around 11 cents a minute. Scrolling the socials becomes a financial decision.
For musicians trying to maintain a presence on land – booking gigs, responding to emails, keeping up with students – this is genuinely difficult. The slow speeds, the time zones constantly shifting depending on where you are in the world, and the fact that everyone on board is trying to get online at the same time in the evening makes it close to impossible to manage anything reliably back home. If you're planning to keep teaching or booking gigs on the side while you're on contract, go in knowing that the internet will fight you the whole way.
Get an international phone plan before you board. It at least gives you something to work with when you're in port.
Rank, privileges, and the entertainment department
On a ship, your rank determines a lot – your cabin size, your pay, and where you're actually allowed to go.
As a musician I'm classed as a petty officer, which puts me somewhere in the middle. I'm allowed in the officer's bar. I'm allowed in certain guest areas on certain days. I've also been yelled at for being somewhere I wasn't supposed to be. It happens.
Musicians and dancers sit inside the entertainment department, which comes with a slightly different experience than most other crew. We tend to have more downtime than departments like housekeeping or food and beverage, where the hours are longer and the work is constant. That breathing room matters over a long contract. It's part of what makes life as a cruise ship musician specifically more sustainable than some other jobs on board – though I'll be honest, it doesn't always feel that way by month five.
Getting off the ship
Every couple of days you'll have an “in-port manning” day where you are required to stay on board. There needs to be a minimum crew on board at all times (even in port) in case an emergency happens. Sometimes you can swap with another crew member if there's a port you really want to explore. Otherwise, as long as your duties don't clash and the country/port allows it, you're free to go ashore.
Most of the time in port you're not going far. Enough to walk around, have a coffee or a beer, maybe grab lunch, and get back in time for rehearsal. But those few hours in a new city – even to step off the ship – add up over a long contract. I've been to places I didn't know existed before I stepped foot on them.
The people
On this ship I was one of very few Americans. Filipinos, Brazilians, Italians, South Africans, Venezuelans, Japanese – every corner of the world is represented. The crew bar stays open until 2 a.m. and is where most of the actual socialising happens. I genuinely enjoyed going. It's one of the better parts of the job.
Working alongside people with many different cultures – different politics, different perspectives, different ways of seeing things – breaks you out of whatever information bubble you've built for yourself back home. You learn empathy quickly. You become friends with people you never would have met otherwise. I think everyone should do at least one ship contract in their lifetime. Americans especially.
The harder side of life as a cruise ship musician is what happens at the end of a contract. You can become close with someone from Estonia or Chile or Indonesia, and when one of you leaves, you might never see each other again. It's bittersweet in a specific way that's hard to describe. But the time you have with them is special.
The stuff nobody wants to talk about
The hierarchy on a ship sits somewhere between military and corporate, and it shapes everything. Whatever your rank, there's someone above you who you're required to listen to – even if what they're asking isn't in your job description, and even if they're not a nice person. Some supervisors are great. Some are small people who've found a small amount of power and like reminding you of it.
The hierarchy also produces a kind of class system. Lower-paying roles tend to be filled by crew from countries where the dollar exchange rate makes the pay viable even when the pay is low. That divide often tracks along national and racial lines, and it's uncomfortable to see. If you're Filipino or Black, you're more likely to encounter racism depending on the culture of the company. Misogyny exists too – it's a male-dominated industry, and with a rigid hierarchy comes the potential for worker abuse and, in some cases, sexual abuse. You can go to HR, but it is primarily there to protect the company from lawsuits, not to protect you. Oftentimes, when abuse happens, the company sends the one who reported it to a different ship, rather than holding any perpetrators accountable.
I'm not saying any of this is universal. Each company, and each individual ship, has a different culture. But it happens, and going in aware is better than being blindsided by it.
The financial reality
Working as a musician on a cruise ship, you're looking at around $3,000 a month, before charges. After crew bar tabs, slop chest purchases, bottled water – it lands a bit lower. Closer to two grand and change in practice, at least in my experience.
That might not sound like a lot. But here's the thing: you have almost no expenses. No rent, no commute, no groceries. If you're intentional about it, you can save money quickly. And after years of the freelance hustle – chasing gigs, counting on irregular income, watching your bank account fluctuate – a steady paycheck every single month is genuinely nice. It's one of the main reasons musicians keep going back to ships even when the contract gets hard. It's also one of the reasons it can be difficult to leave. Going back to the uncertainty of freelance life after the consistency of ship pay takes some adjustment.
Is working on a cruise ship as a musician worth it?
That depends entirely on what you're after.
If you want to save money, see the world, and meet people from everywhere – yes. If you want musical stimulation and artistic challenge every night – that's a more complicated answer, and it's one I get into more in Part 2.
By month four or five, most musicians on ships get a little dark. The tight quarters, the long time away from home, the sameness of it all, starts to wear on you. But in general, it's not a bad gig. There are certainly worse jobs out there. The travel is incredible. The friendships are real. And knowing you’ll have a bank account worth looking at when you get home is not nothing. It's a weird life, but then again, we didn’t become musicians for a normal one.
Want to know more about the musician gig specifically?
This episode covers crew life broadly. If you want the musician-specific picture – how to find an agent, what the audition process looks like, what gear you actually need to bring, what a typical day looks like, and what it's really like to play the same songs every night for months – that's what Part 2 is for.
How to Become a Cruise Ship Musician
Thinking about getting a gig on a cruise ship?
Getting a cruise ship gig means being thrown into situations you might not feel ready for – difficult charts, strong doubles, holding your own every night in front of a full room. These are things you can work on.
I've helped students build the skills they need to start performing professionally – including landing paid gigs. If that's where you're headed and you want some guidance getting there, I offer private online lessons in clarinet, saxophone, and flute.
Frequently asked questions about cruise ship musician life
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It's a strange gig. You're playing shows every night, living in a cabin you can cross in five steps, sailing between countries you didn't know existed, and making friends from every corner of the world – all at the same time. The musical side of it isn't always gratifying. You're playing the same songs on repeat – a lot of Hey Jude, a lot of Dancing Queen – and after your first contract or two, you stop learning much musically. But the life around the music? That part is genuinely unlike anything else. I've played in Hong Kong, sailed past the Canary Islands, and woken up in ports I'd never heard of before I got on board. You can't really put a price on that.
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Generally around five hours a day of actual playing – a rehearsal during the day and two shows in the evening, each running about 45 minutes to an hour. Rehearsals can go longer depending on the guest entertainer, but two hours is usually the ceiling. On top of that there are safety drills and occasional extra duties – embarkation shifts, pool sets, late-night party band sets. Days off are rare. On some contracts I didn't get a single one. Go in expecting to do something every day and you won't be caught off guard.
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In crew cabins, same as everyone else – though your rank determines the size and setup. As a musician I'm classed as a petty officer, so I have a shared cabin with a bunk bed, a small desk, one closet each, and a bathroom just big enough to stand in. The band director – what they call the MD on board – usually gets a single cabin with a porthole, which is considerably nicer. Some departments have it worse than we do, with four people crammed into a space like mine. It's tight no matter what. You get used to it faster than you'd think.
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The two big ones are the travel and the steady paycheck. After years of the freelance hustle, having a reliable amount land in your account every single month is genuinely nice – and because your food and accommodation are covered, you can save a surprising amount even on a modest salary. The travel speaks for itself. I've been to places I never would have reached without this gig as the reason, and after a contract or two there's very little anyone can say to impress you geographically. On top of that you'll meet people from everywhere – crew from Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines, Estonia – and some of those friendships stick long after the contract is done.