For those of you in bands
By tokarus209
@tokarus209 (31)
United States
June 8, 2009 3:34pm CST
have you noticed that venues do everything they can to avoid paying you your hard earned cash? i mean seriously the promotion companies my band has dealt with are a bunch o greedy terds. for instance we played a show with whitechapel, suffocation, psycroptic, and veil of maya, and lets just say, we worked our butts off to sell tickets and promote for the show so we could play. in the contract, it was said that we would get a percentage of our ticket sales as well as have no percentage taken off of our merch sales for the night.
lotta good that did. the promoter for our show "lost" (saying we didnt give him what we said we did even tho before turning in the money we triple checked and then recounted before giving it to them)our ticket money, and threatened to call the cops if we didnt pay the difference. which also meant we weren't getting paid, and the money we made from selling merch was now gone to another group of greedy persons. does anyone else ever have this problem? if not id like to know where u play shows, cus id like to bring our band out there
1 person likes this
2 responses
@tokarus209 (31)
• United States
10 Jun 10
playing shows for fun is a good thing, because i enjoy them, but when your a ep away from getting signed to a major label, and youve played over 200 shows in the last year, youd think that venues and promoters would change their tune a little bit. btw srry for not getting back earlier. ive been busy playing those shows, filming a music video, and finally getting our full length album off the ground and worldwide! still not getting paid for local shows tho. lol
@themdno (402)
• United States
25 Jul 09
Yes, I've had the same problem. Even when they pay you, its barely enough to cover expenses, so when they don't even pay what they promised, it's totally unfair.
In a perfect world I'd say refuse to play there again, but unfortunately the club owners have what you need(the club), and they could care less if they book you or the next band.
The best way to get past that, is selling more tickets than the other bands. If your band makes the club owner more money than the next, the promoter can't afford to lose you, and will pay you what he's supposed to(hopefully).
@tokarus209 (31)
• United States
10 Jun 10
so since i posted this, i also found out that in the state of california its illegal for a venue or promoter to make a band sell tickets themselves in order to play or get paid for a show. hear that ILLEGAL! i dont know if they know this, but it would make sense seeing as most venues ive worked with scoff at legitimate contracts. they have no intention of paying you without doing as little work as possible on their end... people these days. lol i actually did a guest blog on music before the money. a pretty informative site ran by a canadian friend of mine kim kinrade. you should check out her site sometime
