"Pay To Play" For Live Music
The practice of "pay to play" is defined as bands paying to play live at a bar, club, or auditorium. The payments are typically made to the owners of the club; sometimes this happens through a middleman or proxy, otherwise known as promoters.
Much like in the aforementioned payola scheme, the promoter places the financial risk on an unknown band by asking them to provide the owner with revenue. Rather than accept direct payments, promoters ask the band (Usually young and/or naive) to buy tickets. The band then owns some tens of tickets which are then usually sold to their friends. Often, the promised exposure is limited because only family and friends buy tickets and care about the event. The overall effect is to drain money from the band, the friends, and the family members for the false promise of fame and success.
In rock and metal music, some clubs and bars ask some bands to pay to perform. Metal/rock drummer Richie Rivera states that the best clubs to play "...are usually pay-to-play (or what the clubs call 'pre-selling tickets')". Rivera says that while his band has done "pay to play" to perform at venues, in the future, the band will "...only do it for a support slot for a national act".
Jazz trumpeter Marvin Stamm has described a similar "pay to play" issue in New York city jazz clubs. Stamm says that if a jazz "...artist or group is new or unknown, some clubs - even the larger clubs - will ask that the artist or group’s record company guarantee that the club will break even. If there is no record company to back the artist, then he will probably have to guarantee this himself". If there is a poor turnout at the club, the jazz band leader may have to pay hundreds of dollars to the club.
In the US, there are "pay-to-play" "Battle of the Bands" contests where bands pay to perform on stage. Billboard Magazine's Oct. 21, 2006 article "Pay to Get Played" described how a "third-party booking agency in New Jersey" called Audible Spectrum Records was "charging bands up to $350 per show, promising services and opportunities that were never delivered". "Battle of the Bands" are becoming increasingly common in both the U.S.A. and Europe, particularly the U.K. Typically, each band that enters the "battle" will pay a fee, returnable only if a minimum number of tickets is sold for the first round of the contest. Progress in the contest is dependent on "votes". A prize is usually given to the winner.
Read more about this topic: Payola
Famous quotes containing the words pay, play, live and/or music:
“Speak not of my debts unless you mean to pay them.”
—17th century English proverb, collected in George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs (1640)
“I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.”
—Simone Weil (1910–1943)
“The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.”
—Kingsley Amis (1922–1995)
“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)