YOUR Stories About Getting Screwed By Promoters

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 Pete:

So anyways, we had played a show with him back in the day that someone else booked. I guess he liked us, so he reaches out and says, “Hey, I need bands to fill out this show I’m putting on. So-and-so is playing, and I think your band would fit really well stylistically with them.” Awesome, right? When the guy who runs pay to play ASKS you to play the show, you’d think you aren’t falling into that same old trap. WRONG. I message him back, say we’d love to play, and he hits us with, “Great, I’ll just need you to sell 15 or 20 tickets. That’s less than usual since we are pretty close to the day of the show.” I can’t believe what I’m hearing, but try to reason with him by saying how I don’t think that will be possible given our distance from the venue. He says he understands that and relents. Says, no ticket sales so long as we can play the show. I say I appreciate it, but ask if we could get a little gas money, like 20 or 30 bucks to get us home and back. I guess that was the wrong thing to say because he decided to never talk to us again. Sorry dude, if you can’t afford to pay the bands you are booking, then don’t book those bands. And don’t expect to throw a good show by stacking a line up with a bunch of young teenagers playing breakdowns.

Anecdotally, my friend told me a story about that same promoter when he made a post asking if anyone could help him clean out his garage. Someone responded with, “How many tickets do I need to sell?” Gave me a nice laugh to hear that someone was brave enough to call him out.

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When I was much younger my first *real* band (which is to say, the first band that actually regularly played local shows and stuff) was cold contacted by Gorilla Music about a battle of the bands. We had to sell tickets, and the more you sold compared to the other bands, the later you got to play. The show was in Charlotte, NC – about 5 hours from where we lived. We were told that by participating, we would be put on larger *national touring showcases* (which sounded pretty sick at the time, but looking back, it’s just some vague language people use to take advantage of young bands looking to get into “the biz”) and if we won, we’d be given studio time with *big name producers* (I think that’s actually the phrasing they used, lol).

We hounded some friends to buy tickets, and a few did and actually came to the show (I see you Rebecca! Also, sorry!). We handed over the money (and uh, we paid a bit out of our own pocket to get a better spot). Being totally honest, 15 year old me thought the night was pretty fun. We played for a better than average crowd for us at the time. But analyzing what was going on – the “promoter” for Gorilla Music left with over a thousand dollars harvested from young naive bands, their friends, and their parents, and none of the bands (even the winning band, which was – surprise – the band that sold the most tickets) made any money. I didn’t keep up with the band that won, so I don’t know if Gorilla Music followed up with their promise to get them studio time or not. Either way, while I think the endeavor of getting young, probably bad bands out playing shows in front of people can be an admirable one, Gorilla Music definitely was making money by pretending to be something they weren’t to bands that were new enough to believe them, and I don’t think that’s very ethical.

There’s a flip side to this! Aether Realm has played tons of shows as local support for bands larger than us within our genre – Alestorm, Turisas, Ensiferum, Insomnium – and for a lot of these shows we were required by the local promoter to sell tickets. I know some people that think this practice is also an unforgivable pay to play scheme, but I’m a little bit more grey on this one. Sure, I imagine some young bands really think jumping on these shows is like an “investment” in the band (it’s not), but I’ve never felt led astray or pressured to sign up for something I wasn’t ready for in this case. I always felt like being on the hook for 300 dollars worth of tickets, selling 200 dollars worth of them, and then eating the last 100 dollars was something I was just willing to do for the experience of playing with bands I liked. We weren’t really adding a ton of value to the shows, and be being there we made the set-up a little bit more complex. If it was a band we liked, we weren’t spending that much more than we would to go see the show in the first place.

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Thunderforge was offered a gig at Diva’s Nightclub in Northampton, MA, which we heard about through another band in the area. For those not from the area, Diva’s (sadly now closed) was predominantly a LGBTQ nightclub that mostly booked EDM, but at the time was interested in booking live music to fill in the calendar. Most of the bigger venues in western Massachusetts either A) ignore heavy music, B) are owned by scumbags, or C) both, and we were chomping at the bit to have another larger club where we could have touring bands come through, and we took the show hoping it would lead to more.

There were ticket sales involved, but that was nothing new for us. We were never informed, however, that we were required to sell a minimum number of those tickets – until we get a Facebook message a couple of days before the show, from someone we’ve never met or heard of, asking how many we’ve sold. Apparently, some local “record label” was the promoter in charge of the show, and never bothered to contact us until the absolute last minute, or tell us that we’d be on the hook for unsold tickets if they couldn’t cover the rental fee for the venue.

Red flags immediately start going up, and we hit up some of our friends who were also playing – they’ve never heard of these guys either. We hit up the band who hooked us up with the gig, and they’ve heard of the label, but not these dudes messaging us. I also look up the label’s social media profiles and see that they’ve done absolutely zero promotion for the show. At this point, we (along with most of the other bands) decide to bail on the show, and while we don’t divulge the full details, we make it known that the cancellation is due to the unprofessional way in which the show was handled.

These guys finally decide to get active on Facebook and blame “band negligence” (lol) for the cancellation. We get a response to our post about the cancellation from “a friend” of the label (who was clearly listed on their FB page as the owner/admin) claiming they put in a lot of “hard work” and even had “radio promotion” for the show. We reply directly with a list of all the ways the show was run horribly, from the fact that none of the bands even knew who these guys were, to the undisclosed ticket minimums, to the complete lack of promotion (you claim there was radio promo, and you don’t ask bands for music to play or try to get them on the air?), to the fact that they had the nerve to blame the bands for their terrible mishandling of what could have been a great opportunity.

The “label” tried to crowdfund a studio construction project a couple years ago, but hasn’t posted on social media in over two years. Diva’s, as I mentioned, is no longer open, and metal shows never really materialized there before it shut down – though, to be fair, they had nothing to do with the promoter’s shittiness.

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1. So literally we got booked after our first show ever, and I guess the promoter heard we opened our first show to like 70 people and this dude books us as headliner. Yes, books us as headliner. Like billed it with our band photo in the flier, whole nine yards. I even told him we were very new. Obviously we played to like 10 people but the best part about it was the direct support band got legitimately mad at us for headlining – as if we made that call.

2. A super shady, piece of shit promoter whom we have completely severed ties with booked a whole bunch of locals and tried getting the bands to do presale. I guess bands were dropping left and right due to this bullshit and after two months of failed correspondence the promoter finally cancelled the event.

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My name is Rob and I was part drummer for a band named Earth To Julie back in 2003-2006. I believe it was either the 2005 BotB or 2006 BotB (I believe it was the 2006) I remember seeing flyers around Peabodies for local bands to sign up and be a part of their annual Battle of the Bands. We thought it was a good idea at the time and reached out to sign up. I remember going out to Peabodies to speak with the promoter and was given a ton of promises: exposure (exposure to what, damned if I knew. I was younger and dumber), the full stage setup, etc. Little did we know it was nothing more than a ticket selling machine (i.e. free labor for Peabodies). They would base how many tickets you sold to where you were placed on the set list. Obviously, there’s problems with this. 1.) That means some group off teens that probably have no live experience but able to have their parents sell $10 tickets at work are going to get waaay higher billing than, you know, anyone else and 2.) You have no fucking clue where you sit on the set list till literally the morning of the show. 3.) people you sold tickets to probably aren’t interested in the other acts, they’re there to see you.

Anyway, we do our part and sell some tickets, not many but it was something (5-10 tickets?). We really didn’t put our hearts into selling tickets, my thinking at the time was that this is supposed major promoted show, why are they relying entirely on us to sell tickets? That totally wasn’t the case. As far as I could tell, Peabodies didn’t promote the show that much at all and relied 100% on bands to sell tickets. I remember seeing flyers for the signup but NEVER for the act itself. I lived downtown at the time at the Chesterfield and distinctly remember never seeing one flyer, ever. Anywhere.

Moving on, we get to the day of the show and we still don’t know our set list yet. We have friends asking about when we’re playing and we don’t have an answer. About 45 minutes before everything is about to start we’re finally told that we are FIRST on the set list and we should assemble for sound check right now. Completely unprofessional. Everyone was absolutely rude, downright dickish during the entire process.Our friends never saw us perform since set lists were cut so short due to the amounts of bands on the bill. I think we ended up playing just to the bar tenders and bar runners.

Safe to say we never went back. Whole experience was extremely unprofessional and a bait & switch. What exposure they promised was a few bar tenders and a sound guy and any benefit of friends buying tickets right from you instead of paying extra at the door went right down the toilet when the venue can’t even tell you when you play until literally it’s time for sound check. I’m just guessing but I would assume most people would of called this a scam.

My band got to open for [a national tour] back in May, and the promoter had us sell presale tickets. We were given the impression that we would be direct support. A few days before the show, I asked her our set times because my bassist & guitarist weren’t able to leave work early that day. She keeps sidestepping it and asking how many tickets we’ve sold. The day of the show, she messages me at 5:15 and tells us she needs us there at 5:30 while my bassist is still at work on the other side of town. So we bust ass to get to the venue and she has us go on at 6:20 without a sound check. I told her that we had been asking for set times for the past 5 days and she turns it around and says “you guys should’ve been here an hour before doors opened.” And we also only got paid $2 a ticket. That’s her going rate for national shows. We haven’t worked with her since obviously. There’s another promoter that requires “deposits” to be put on national shows (usually $100+), and these deposits are only returned to you if you sell a particular number of tickets (usually 25+ at $15+). And only after you sell your first 25 tickets do you get a cut off the ticket price (usually 30-40%). If you don’t meet the 25 ticket quota, he keeps your deposit.

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