This Nonprofit Pays Denver Musicians a Living Wage for Shows

For local musicians, it’s no secret that life in the music scene can feel harsh and unsustainable. From consignment ticket sales models and low streaming pay to hyper-competitive scenes, the music industry has hardly become the utopia that many artists might have hoped for once upon a time.

Those harsh realities and others sparked A Place for Owls frontman Ben Sooy to launch Holy Fool, a Denver-based music nonprofit that’s raising money to pay musicians living wages, create community in the scene, and offer other tangible resources to make music more hospitable.

“The problems that working musicians are facing, I think, are dialed up more than ever,” Sooy says.

“Every artist and band that I know is so desperate for support and friendship and attention, and also, the world teaches you to view every other person that’s doing roughly the same thing that you’re doing as your competition, instead of your collaborators and friends.”

As a musician for more than twenty years, working between Colorado and Virginia, Sooy remembers easier eras in the music promotion ecosystem, when “you could book a whole tour through Myspace” or make a Facebook event “that meant that sixty kids were going to show up to your basement house show.”

But with the advent of streaming, there’s less money than ever for working musicians, he explains, and the socio-emotional impact of these stresses have also made it challenging for sensitive folks in a capitalistic world to become hardened. The result is a competitive, largely-insular environment.

“Madness is normalized in crowds, and that has an evil application that we see all the time: that we’re dehumanizing immigrants, and we’re dehumanizing LGBTQ people; we’re dehumanizing anybody that’s different than the white Christian mainstream,” he says. “But we can normalize healthy madness. That’s why we called it Holy Fool, where it’s just, like, can we be insane, but in a good way together?”

After all, many musicians say they believe in virtues such as collaboration, openness, progress and cooperation.”We spend so much time giving lip service to how much we hate capitalism or imperialism or whatever,” Sooy adds, “but we internalize those same sort of attitudes when it comes to being so cutthroat and hard with each other.”

He’s seen many musicians burn out over the years after chasing some idea of commercial success. As a result, Sooy says, people lose their artistic ambitions and dreams, and often become worse partners, friends and music-community members.

“The thing that sort of keeps me up at night is anybody that I have met that just routes to Nashville or New York or L.A. to do music, they come back like a husky shell of themselves, and they lose all the joy and passion of music and life and everything as a result,” Sooy adds.

“Can we build an environment in Colorado where you don’t have to become an asshole in order to succeed in music?”

Holy Fool aims to address these and other issues, perhaps most prominently by throwing DIY shows that pay musicians an actual living wage. The organization offers a $500 guarantee to any artists who play its shows, while also providing drinks, food and whatever other hospitality it can. These shows deliberately utilize houses and other DIY spaces to sidestep venues that require such practices as consignment ticket sales; Sooy wonders if making these kinds of shows more widespread could someday completely marginalize venues with predatory practices.

His group hosts musician meetup dinners as well, with catered or donated food, beer and other beverages; these events help cultivate community and collaboration within the scene.

Sooy also hosts the Holy Fool podcast, which brings on musicians to talk about the industry. Recently, he’s had conversations with Tim Foreman (Switchfoot, Bongo Chico), and Denver bands including Creek and Broken Record.

The idea for the nonprofit was born out of Sooy’s own experience with A Place for Owls, and from conversations with his musician friends. Instead of falling into bitterness and becoming competitive with others, Sooy wondered if he could use music to promote just the opposite: embrace scene collaboration and support venues with artist-centric practices that cultivate a healthy community.

“I was challenged by this thought: Most of us are so anxious for help, but that sort of gives us tunnel vision for the needs of others,” he says. “But what if we flipped that?

“What if we became the sort of people that started helping our friends and neighbors and even helping our enemies—people that the world teaches us are our competition—and we just became the sort of people that gave good advice and resources and [gave] our money away open-handedly?”

Sooy decided to leverage his background working at nonprofits, mainly in roles related to refugees, immigrants and unhoused folks. After talking with a few of his closest friends in music, including fellow A Place for Owls member Daniel Perez (who is now a Holy Fool board member), the group gained 501c3 status in 2025. According to Sooy, the organization currently has around $7,000 in the bank; it raised around $10,000 last year through monthly donations and lump-sum contributions. The organization is completely run by volunteers and no one draws a salary at this point, though he jokes about “actually making executive director money” if fundraising were to take off.

While Sooey notes that this is a fairly small amount of money in the vast nonprofit world, he also highlights dreams of gaining more fundraising so that Holy Fool can do even more within the community.

Beyond being able to book more shows and thus pay more artists, Sooy imagines how much more the nonprofit could do “if millions of dollars drop in our laps,” something he says is not out of the realm of possibility in the nonprofit sector. He dreams of Holy Fool having enough funding to someday own a house in Denver, which would be inhabited by a few working musicians with heavily subsidized rent. The space could offer nice, clean rooms where touring musicians could stay along with rentable recording spaces, and he imagines a collaborative arrangement in which musicians can work for and with each other to support non-music needs for each other’s projects.

“Let’s say you don’t want to run social media for your bands,” he says. “Can we just do that as a community? Like there’s one guy or gal or whatever that is running the social for a few bands locally, and they’re maybe making $25 an hour to do that, and we do it in a way that’s above board and moral and equitable.”

Holy Fool recently announced a partnership with Blucifer’s First Rodeo, the new DIY-focused festival created by a group of musicians in the Denver scene; Holy Fool is offering prospective donors and corporate sponsors tax-exempt status if they donate to the fest through the nonprofit. That way, donors will be able to pay for specific elements of the festival, whether helping to offset operation costs, offering earmarked pay for the artists, or making food donations or other physical gifts.

“In a lot of ways, the nonprofit is formalizing stuff that just happens naturally in a healthy music scene, anyway,” Sooy says. “People network with each other. People share all the stuff that they need to share.”

Find more details about the nonprofit’s upcoming shows and more on the Holy Fool website, or by following the group on Instagram.