If you're reading this chances are you are (or have once been) part a young unsigned band who has at some point been exploited by the uncompromisingly nasty pay to play (p2p) system. It's taken me this long to vent publicly about it only due to general complacency but I have a spare hour so why not use it to guide potential victims out of harms way. If you still want to accept pay to play gigs after reading this, then fair enough. But please spare a thought for those of us that wish to banish this arcane practice to the footnotes of musical history.

Pay to play exploits bands, damages the live unsigned music scene, makes it harder for bands to pull an audience (outside of their close friends and families of course who will have seen you so many times by now they know your songs as well as you do) and bails out promoters who shouldn't be in the job in the first place!

There may be confusion over what pay to play actually is, but in simple terms, it's a system wherein a venue and/or promoter expects you to pay for the privilege of playing a gig either outright or through a thinly veiled 'ticketed' system.

Here's how it works. A promoter offers you a gig and you're given a book of tickets to sell. Either you'll be asked to pay the promoter a fee upfront (the very worst), or it's explained to you that there's a minimum number of tickets you *must* sell (or else you'll be pulled from the lineup) - and give the promoter the proceeds. You're only allowed to keep any ticket revenue once you've reached a set figure (which could be anywhere from 10 to 100); if you don't make enough, you have to pay the shortfall out of your own pocket. In most cases the P2P figure is between £30 and £80 for between 20 and 50 tickets but I have found the average to be around £50.

Pay to play shouldn't be confused with a venue hire, which is when you pay a venue a hire fee and setup your own gig. With a venue hire, it's your gig. You choose the bands, promote the gig, control the whole...

If you're reading this chances are you are (or have once been) part a young unsigned band who has at some point been exploited by the uncompromisingly nasty pay to play (p2p) system. It's taken me this long to vent publicly about it only due to general complacency but I have a spare hour so why not use it to guide potential victims out of harms way. If you still want to accept pay to play gigs after reading this, then fair enough. But please spare a thought for those of us that wish to banish this arcane practice to the footnotes of musical history.

Pay to play exploits bands, damages the live unsigned music scene, makes it harder for bands to pull an audience (outside of their close friends and families of course who will have seen you so many times by now they know your songs as well as you do) and bails out promoters who shouldn't be in the job in the first place!

There may be confusion over what pay to play actually is, but in simple terms, it's a system wherein a venue and/or promoter expects you to pay for the privilege of playing a gig either outright or through a thinly veiled 'ticketed' system.

Here's how it works. A promoter offers you a gig and you're given a book of tickets to sell. Either you'll be asked to pay the promoter a fee upfront (the very worst), or it's explained to you that there's a minimum number of tickets you *must* sell (or else you'll be pulled from the lineup) - and give the promoter the proceeds. You're only allowed to keep any ticket revenue once you've reached a set figure (which could be anywhere from 10 to 100); if you don't make enough, you have to pay the shortfall out of your own pocket. In most cases the P2P figure is between £30 and £80 for between 20 and 50 tickets but I have found the average to be around £50.

Pay to play shouldn't be confused with a venue hire, which is when you pay a venue a hire fee and setup your own gig. With a venue hire, it's your gig. You choose the bands, promote the gig, control the whole thing. You can charge admission or let people in for free - it's entirely up to you. It's your gig.

With pay to play gigs, you don't have any of that control. The ticket price is designated by the promoter as are the other bands and the running order. But the promoter isn't taking any risks. When you hire a venue to do your own gig, if nobody turns up then you're out of pocket - a pretty good sign that perhaps you're being too ambitious. However, with a pay to play gig, if nobody turns up the promoter isn't out of pocket - so he or she has no incentive to promote the gig themselves (which is surely the main aspect of the job isn't it?).

Pay to play is a rotten practice because the promoter isn't taking any risk - but the bands are. If nobody turns up, the promoter isn't out of pocket; the bands are. And as a result, few pay to play promoters do anything to justify their job title. They won't send out press releases, tell the NME about your gig or even get the gig listed in the local papers. You won't see posters around the city, flyers in bars and at other gigs or emailed adverts to the venue's mailing list. If you're lucky, the promoter will stick a crudely photocopied A4 poster behind the bar on the night of the gig.

Bands rarely sell enough tickets to cover the pay to play fee, and as a result they dip into their own pockets to cover the money due to the venue. Rather than being paid to do the gig you end paying the venue for the privilege of playing to an empty room. Add in transport costs and your looking at a pretty steep outlay. Gigs in the past have cost us anywhere from £50 to £100 including petrol and parking costs (and the odd ticket... but lets not dwell on that).

The venue wouldn't dream of charging the bar staff for the privilege of working there. Why should you pay for the privilege of making money for the promoter? Because that's what you're doing.

It's also worth pointing out that some pay to play gigs are run in-house by the venue. They certainly shouldn't be taking money from the bands, as they can always rely on the money taken at the bar. That's why pay to play gigs are rarely on a Friday or Saturday night - instead, they're relying on you to bring punters through the door on a slow night so they can sell overpriced booze to them (one venue I recall charged me £4 for a pint of guinness). In other words, the venue is making a fortune from you, and should be paying you. Even if just the band members buy 3 or 4 drinks each (a very likely scenario) the venue is making a profit. Add in upfront ticket sales (that may or may not have been successfully sold) and the venue is looking at a killing regardless of how many punters show up to support the bands. 90% of the time barely ANY of the profit is spent of promoting the gig and as such its a cycle that endlessly repeats night after night, week after week.

Any alternative to a p2p system would be a fairer deal for the bands. A 50/50 split on door sales, a small upfront fee for the artists (which would give the promoters the incentive to PROMOTE) or even a ticketed system that doesn't require the band to pay upfront. Most unsigned bands we know (ourselves included) are sick to the gills of playing to girlfriends and family members. That is no way to build a fanbase as you are playing to people who are already aware of your existence and will support you regardless of what they think of your music. The whole point of these nights is for bands to develop fans and as such it's a viscous cycle that's almost impossible to get in on. You need a fanbase to get a gig but you need to gig in order to develop a fanbase. This leads to the usual friends and family scenario which is just a dead end.

You may very well make a profit after your first p2p gig in your hometown once you get everyone you know excited about it. The problem with that is you won't make as much money next time, and you'll make less the time after that. People come to see you because they know you, and they'll eventually lose interest. Your first gig will be the biggest audience you'll ever get and the numbers get smaller with each gig.

The fact of the matter is that pay to play gigs aren't any good. Bands are often playing their very first gig and as such are very often simply not very good (80% of the bands we play with are god awful). The general public, as a rule, don't go to pay to play gigs: why pay £3, £4 to see three crap bands you've never heard of? So you never get in front of a new audience, you never get any better at what you do, your friends drift away and your band splits up. All this before you've managed to secure your first supermodel girlfriend and serious drug addiction... for shame!

Pay to play is killing the live music scene, and bands need to accept some responsibility for that. You aren't ready to play a 200 capacity venue on your first gig, no matter how much the idea appeals to your ego (and of course you have an ego.. why else would you be in a band?). You need to play small venues with fair conditions and learn how to be a band, become musically tight and develop your songs (it took us 2 years believe it or not) before there's any point in even thinking about doing ticketed gigs.

By all means do the pay to play gigs if you think you can fill the venue. But don't complain about the state of the unsigned music scene if you do. If you support pay to play venues, you're part of the problem. Let's cut this off at the source and REFUSE these gigs, give the honest to god 'promoters' a chance and hopefully carve out a brighter future for ourselves.

Take care

Ben/DLO

My Band's Website