A discussion about promoting live music.

I had another gig last night and it went fairly well. There were a few hiccups with regards to kit and certain logistics that got me thinking about some things.

I had a gig in a pub which wouldn't normally do the standard format of people paying on the door. The landlady said that I could do this but would have to let the regulars in for nothing in case they got pissy. Fair enough, I thought. They had one of their staff on the doors with us letting us know who was ok to come in for nothing and who we were allowed to charge.

I had a system were I would tally the number of people who paid against the number of people we let in for nothing. It turns out that it was pretty much 50/50 and I worked out that I had lost £200 from letting people in for nothing. I had just about broke even but the bands didn't get a great cut.

Shit innit?


tl;dr? Talk about promoting.

There's this one pub in Carmarthen that would be great for this acoustic guy that's touring in september but they won't let promoters charge on the door anymore because they think it'll scare away the regulars. Which is fair enough I suppose.

Also I am meant to have two people helping me with my next gig but they've left all of the work to me *sob sob*

Being "in charge" is a pain in the arse. You're like a duck; to observers everything's gliding along smoothly but beneath the surface you're kickin like a bastard to keep it all going.

Last gig we put on the bands who brought guitar cabs left early so we were stuck with two metal bands who had nothing to plug their guitarists into. After twenty touch-and-go minutes of cab rides and amp borrowing we sorted it out but it was a close one.

Most good venues will pay you to promote at their pub/club. say they pay you £300 you divide that money up between your expenses and they make that money back on drinks. obviously you have to proove yourself to get more money etc.

or

you charge everyone except those on the guestlists. anything else is just gonna make you lose hair.

ScottMoon wrote:Most good venues will pay you to promote at their pub/club. say they pay you £300 you divide that money up between your expenses and they make that money back on drinks. obviously you have to proove yourself to get more money etc.

or

you charge everyone except those on the guestlists. anything else is just gonna make you lose hair.

When I get more well known, yeah. I'm still relatively new at this though. And emphasis goes on 'Most good venues'

I like to put on bands that people wouldn't have heard of but they would appreciate. The trouble is it's bloody expensive. I'll just have to stick with those on tour from now on. I've only got one more until next year though.

Yeah, annoying thing is people don't like to go to gigs that they don't know any of the bands.

ScottMoon wrote:Most good venues will pay you to promote at their pub/club

I have to say, this really isn't the case. Most places expect to be paid for room hire, or stuff is done in-house - apart from that, a venue generally doesn't need to pay a promoter to do the booking. This isn't necessarily a bad point on behalf of the venues/the job of promoting, it's just the way it is - you make your money and recoup your costs by doing a good job of promoting the show.

I don't honestly know of any 'good' venues that would pay a promoter to put gigs on in their pub on the promise of perceived bar takings. I know a few good ones that are cheap, possibly some that would be free, but none that would pay the promoter outright.

Pretty much all the places in Norwich that allow promoters to put gigs on are free. That's pretty sweet but I guess it makes up for the amount of people who actually want to go to gigs.

In Carmarthen there is one venue and I have to pay £150 for it.

I dont even want to say how much it costs to put on a gig at fibbers, suffice to say, im friends with the guy who manages it and the guy in charge of booking, and the 'mates rates' price they offered me was still more than what you pay steff.

Last I knew the cavern in exeter was £200 to book, but that was 2 maybe 3 years ago, Its the best Venue in Exeter(and possibly anywhere south of bristol) and would give your gig alot of publicity without much promotion. Apart from there though, There was The Hub, but that closed down the other day I wasn't the biggest fan of that place anyway... theres not many other venues apart from those two though. Unless your talking university but i'd imagine that'd cost thounsands of £££.

Seeing as the gigs we put on are for members of a University society we do a lot of stuff at our uni. The venue in the union is free and the bar is free as long as people buy enough drinks. However we have to pay for tech and security staff through the union's tech and security departments respectively, which sets us back between £300 to £500 per gig. Ticket costs are targeted at recouping this, though we rarely ever do. As a result we can only book bands who will play for free or who only ask for travel costs. Fortunately there are loads of small local bands that are up for this, but without more help from the university we could never book anyone "big". The venue itself is long & thin with the bar at one end and the stage at the other, so it can be hard to get people to come up to the front for the bands to get a decent crowd.

If we don't use the student union then we can book an upstairs room in a local pub which is either cheap or free. When we do that we have to provide our own soundman, PA, mixer, etc. Unfortunately the only decent & cheap person we know is a bit creepy and has been accused of being a rapist. There's no proper stage or anything there either so it's not an ideal venue either, but you work with what you got.

The Hub owned the Cavern hands down. The Cavern isn't bad but the Hub was waaay better, and the notion that the Cavern is one of the best venues south of Bristol is a larf!

Furious D wrote:The Hub owned the Cavern hands down. The Cavern isn't bad but the Hub was waaay better, and the notion that the Cavern is one of the best venues south of Bristol is a larf!

thats cos it wasnt in Bristol

It has a very big history, and it's not just the bands it puts on, it's also the only place in exeter with a decent club night. and thats just an opinion of someone who's local to the place, and has been to alot of other venues south of bristol and enjoyed the most shows at the cavern, so I don't think its a laugh at all... maybe I just see it like that because when I first started going to shows, the cavern was the only punk venue in Exeter, but I just never felt comfortable at a gig in the hub, my personal next favourite venue would be the white rabbit in plymouth and one that closed down in barnstaple called the exeter inn. I just felt the hub never had much character, and as i said before never felt that comfortable.

last time I was in exeter i ended up staying at a club night promoters house over night and she was saying that they got the cavern for free and split door profit 50/50 with the venue that seemed rather good to me, that was for a pure popular clubnight (the indi/type electro type one) but this is certainaly the only time iv herd of a venu paying the promoter (bar in house promotion)

We've been incredibly lucky when it comes to promoting, and been handed some pretty massive opportunities from day one.

Although Peeky had promoted beforehand, and had some pretty good experience built up, the third ever gig we did as 'Non Stop Promotions' was The Aquabats and Allister (with SB6, Mumrah (the Display Team) and The Riverclub) at Josephs Well in Leeds.

I still to this day don't quite know how we made it work. We had to borrow a pretty big sum from one of my mates to pay the bands on the night, we let too many people into the venue and we managed to run until just after midnight when the curfew was 11pm.
It was bloody fun though.

After that it seemed to open avenues for us, and we managed to get more sizeable bands on. Then the following year we were asked by the Cockpit in Leeds (easily the most established venue in the city) if we were up for promoting shows there. We pretty much bit their hand off, and despite the horror stories about bigger venues ripping promoters off, they've actually helped us much more with our promotion than we really expected.

My general advice is basically for promoters to be prepared to take big risks, and it'll help your reputation and hopefully pay off later on. There's been times when we've lost £400 on a single show, but others when we've made that sum back, it's swings and roundabouts really.

Also, the basic cost of a venue often puts promoters off, but look at everything that you're getting with the price. A venue might be free, but if it's out of the way and does no internal promotion, your attendance is likely to be much less. Whereas you could pay up to £200 for a venue, including PA/Sound Engineer and have your gig appearing on all sorts of flyers, listings, local magazines. Meaning people are more likely to hear about it and come along. It's sometimes worth the extra money.

Yeah that sounds about right to me with the venue, I've always made a profit on gigs where I've had to pay for the venue, but made a loss on the free venue I used the other day. That's pretty general though, I'm sure there are free venues that help out with promotion as much as there are expensive ones where they do nothing to advertise it.

none of the venues round here do any promotion of their own whether you hire them or get them free and have flyer deals on the door (2 quid to venue, 2 quid to bands) they just tend to rely on the promoters but most of the promoters round here don't do anything either! bands are pretty much left to their own divices to bring people in. There is one promoter that cocasionally texts round if there's a big gig on but that's about it