"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:
“How like a prodigal doth nature seem,
When thou, for all thy gold, so common art!
Thou teachest me to deem
More sacredly of every human heart,
Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam
Of Heaven, and could some wondrous secret show,
Did we but pay the love we owe,
And with a child’s undoubting wisdom look
On all these living pages of God’s book.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Did the kiss of Mother Mary
Put that music in her face?
Yet she goes with footstep wary,
Full of earth’s old timid grace.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)