Hillary the Harpist: Two Speeds, One Brand, 55K Followers

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That's Hillary Schefter. You know her as Hillary the Harpist. Welcome to the MoneyGigs Podcast, the show where we talk to working musicians about the real business of making money playing music — not the highlight reel, the pay, the logistics, the anxiety, the actual math of it. I'm Cliff, and today's guest might be doing more at once than anyone we've had on: a hotel residency in Denver, about 20 orchestra concerts a year, private gigs, a harp studio, and with her husband, a restaurant and food truck. On top of all of that, she's built more than 50,000 followers on TikTok by going live nearly every single day. She's also an Eastman-trained classical harpist who played her first gig at age 12 — there's a story in there about a groomsman fainting mid-processional; she kept playing. What I wanted to get into with her is the gap between the two versions of her people see online — the fully-gowned, cinematic Disney Hillary, and the real Hillary loading calzones into her car between gigs. And we'll also get into the night a platform algorithm change wiped out her entire living room overnight, with no warning. This is Hillary Schefter. Let's go.

So I told my followers this — I made a post because my husband built me a gown rack for my gowns, because they'd been taking over my closet. I have a fancy hotel lobby gig, and if you're there three times a week, I don't want to wear the same two or three gowns. So I did what every woman does and just bought more. But I usually like to Goodwill thrift, so I've developed this gown issue over about a year. He built me a gown rack, and I realized I basically only have two speeds — it's either wearing pajamas and one of his sweatshirts, or gowns. Am I staying inside or am I going outside? My casual clothes have kind of suffered since Covid, because either I'm inside or I'm probably out doing a harp gig.

Covid was an interesting time, music-wise, and for the restaurant too, because we owned a food truck at that time. Thankfully we were able to keep things afloat with the food truck because people wanted variety but couldn't go to restaurants — bring the restaurant to your neighborhood. People were grateful, even if it was down to the tennis court parking lot to get a calzone. But when my gig calendar completely dropped off, I spent a couple days crying. And then the introvert in me was like — when the social calendar dropped off, this is really nice. There's no expectation that I need to go to any parties. I thought, this might be a great opportunity to really sit with how introverted I am.

Oh, hardcore — more than my husband, for sure. He plays closer to the extrovert line than I do. The hard part about going live all the time is you have to be on — ready to take whatever people send your way in the comments, which is a whole different bag of worms.

I never thought so. I had a friend who played piano professionally at Eastman, and he told me that's a thing with pianists — either the instrument overwhelms them, or they'll try to hide behind it because of its size. For whatever reason, I never felt that with harp; I think because it's vertical instead of a large box sideways. In college, especially at Eastman, it was scary to play in front of people because they can hear everything you're thinking — you can't hide. I kind of wanted to hide behind an artifice of really good technique so people would look at that instead of my insecurity over whether I had musical ideas or was good enough. Because that was what was really going on underneath most of the time.

So you started performing at 12? Most of us were barely competent at 12.

I'd only been playing harp for about four years, but it was that thing where my parents were like — we've got a friend getting married, and you play harp, so for 50 bucks she'll play for your wedding. They wanted to give me the exposure of what it's like to do a gig and get paid for it.

This is the first and only time I've actually played a wedding where someone fainted. I was up on this little stage area in the church, and the groomsmen were facing me. All of a sudden I see this guy exhale, his whole face goes sheet white, and he goes down — straight backwards, like a plank. I was like, do I keep playing? I looked at my mom, she's like, I don't know. Someone called the paramedics — they had to give him oxygen in the aisle. I stopped playing because the flower girls were dropping flowers and leaving pollen everywhere, so I figured I'd go chill with them since I didn't know what else to do. Literally the first and only time that's happened.

I didn't have that kind of "oh my gosh, I'm so nervous in front of a camera" moment, since I've been performing for a long time. Photographers come at you at weddings in the middle of stuff, so you're just like, cool. I like being in front of camera — that's something I've learned about myself. So being on stage or on camera, great, I was already comfy with that, which is unusual for a lot of creators starting out. But it's definitely a different muscle as far as how to monetize — there's not a lot of instruction out there until you're already seeing some success. Monetizing it is interesting because it's all through gifting, from people in the room. Gifting is very gamified — very much like a casino, honestly. I get why they've done it; it's to stop the scrolling and the short attention span thing. For full-time creators, TikTok wants you to go live for like five hours at a time, which is wild to me.

I know which one you're talking about. I was playing a wedding, trying out going live during gigs. Probably a kid came into the room and typed something like, "this isn't even worth watching." Usually I don't engage with trolls, but this was too good not to. I told my husband about it and he goes, "you should wipe your face with hundred-dollar bills." I was like, that's the perfect TikTok. It's ridiculous, but it's content.

It was unbelievable. At first I thought it was real, so you should maybe consider an acting career — and then I noticed the dollar bills. So this is an audio podcast, so what I'm referring to is a video where Hillary was confronted with a troll and in response went on camera wiping her tears away with hundreds and fifties. Fantastic table-flip moment. I'll try to include a link to that in the show notes.

For TikTok lives — mine was just, I'm going to play harp on the Internet and see what happens. There was already a harpist or two who were pretty famous on TikTok, and I remember thinking, I can do exactly that. My husband got tired of me asking why they were experiencing so much success, and he said, because they're doing it — they're going online, they're posting content, so why don't you just do it? So I did. I started by piggybacking off gigs I already had, so I wouldn't feel so on the spot. Luckily I had a hotel gig where I could just put the camera on my face and interact with guests, giving them an idea of what it's like to be on the stand of a professional musician. Then I added harp and morning coffee, because who doesn't want to wake up to that.

Since I started going live, I had the thought — what happens if I go live every single day? Let's give it a year, because you can't really do less than that and expect to see something real. That was October 31st, Halloween. I went live every day whether I had a gig or not, and my page exploded. I had about 8,000 followers, hit 10,000 before Thanksgiving, 20,000 just after Christmas, 30,000 just before February. But it's since slowed down — literally the day Larry Ellison's group took TikTok over from ByteDance, things got very weird with the app. My viewership would spike to a thousand people in the room and then drop to 20. All the gifting people had sent me that day was just gone — it went from making 80 bucks to zero. Everyone's stuff was wiped that day. Since then, room sizes have gone down drastically — I used to hang around five or six hundred people in a room, then it dwindled to 300, then 200, then 100 to 125. Now I'm sitting at 50 to 80 during the week, spiking to 100–200 on weekends. It's like being at a gig with 600 people and 500 of them suddenly leaving — you get a minor panic. Is it me, or what's going on?

Yes, yes and no. There's the artist side of you that has this purity, where you want this to represent something. And then the business-owner side is like, okay, does this need to be worth it? I'm in it to make money too — I get paid when I leave the house. I actually got this from a friend on TikTok: I was feeling bad about saying I won't play requests unless you tip, and she told me it's not money-grubbing, it's an issue of respect — it takes a lot of time and money to learn this instrument, and tipping is how people show respect for that effort. So it feels weird putting stuff behind a paywall, but that's what I'm doing. If someone asks me to do a gig for exposure, I say no. I don't think I've done an exposure gig since high school. That's something I learned at Eastman too — they have an arts leadership program, and they make a big point that professional musicians get paid.

I haven't asked you this. What does the future hold for Hillary?

Oh, that's a great question. I don't know — we've got some time left on the lease for our restaurant, so we'll be here in Denver until that goes up. My husband and I have already had the discussion: we're not going to renew that lease, for reasons with the landlord and where we are in our lives. We knew even when we started restaurant-ing and food-trucking, when we got engaged, that we weren't career lifelong restaurant people. There's something Anthony Bourdain used to say — you learn everything you need to in a kitchen. You learn about people, community, how to resolve conflict, how to have fun under stress. It's a nice counterbalance to playing harp on very pretty stages in very pretty places. It's nice to be the dishwasher once in a while.

And that's Hillary Schefter, Hillary the Harpist. Big thanks to her for the time and for being so open about all of it — the two-speed wardrobe, the introvert confession, the night the algorithm just erased her room. If there's one thing worth sitting with from this one, it's what she said about her brand: the money follows the belief, not the other way around. Do the thing well, be honest about who you are while you're doing it, and the tip jar tends to work itself out. Go find her — she's hillarytheharpist on TikTok and Instagram, and hillarytheharpist.com has her actual schedule. I told her on air I'd drop a link to the $100-bill video in the show notes — it's there, go watch it. And if you're a gigging musician yourself trying to make the math work — track your gigs, your pay, your actual take-home per hour — that's exactly what MoneyGigs is for. There's a code in the show notes to get you in. Thanks for listening. I'm Cliff. Go play for somebody.