Pay to Play?

I recently had an interesting go-round discussion with one of my Facebook musician friends, Steve Bentley of Greenman Rising, an awesome UK folk-rock band with an incredible sense of theatrics and stage presence, not to mention some extraordinary musicianship -- check them out at http://www.greenmanrising.co.uk/ or on Facebook. The subject of our civilized discourse was pay-to-play booking application services, like SonicBids.

I had mentioned booking something or another through SonicBids. Steve was aghast, and said that UK bands just simply absolutely won't pay to play.

Philosophically, point well taken, and the righteously indignant part of me has to agree with him. It seems rather outrageous--especially when half the time you're paying to apply to play at an unpaid gig, or one for a cut of the door that somehow never materializes because someone else remembered to bribe the bouncers into saying everyone was there for their band, not yours. Besides, screams the musician's soul, I'm an ARTIST! I do not PAY for the right to PERFORM MY ART!!!!

But, then there's the practical business side of me, the lawyer, the small businessperson, the mom and billpayer who is forever chasing Benjamins and has to make practical decisions. The facts run somewhat like this: Hard-copy promo kits cost us around $10 a piece to make. CD, folder, press clips, color photos, lists of venues etc. Dang, they look nice. So dropping them off takes $10 plus my time and gas. Mailing them is another couple bucks. A large percentage of the time, these hard-copy kits are just chucked in the trash. There's one Irish chain bar near us that seems to change managers about every 6 months, and each time we get a call asking us to send a promo kit. We've dropped off at least 12 to them in the last several years. That's a lot of dough-re-me for nothin'.

SonicBids costs me like $144 a year for membership, which hosts me a really nice quality electronic press kit which can be easily emailed--for absolutely no additional fee--to anyplace I want to email it to, and I can simply link to it in any email or social media posting. For this level of membership, we also get about 25 free submissions to lower-level listed venues each month, including radio airplay, tv and movie submissions, coffeehouses, festivals, and magazine reviews. I've had a pretty high level of success with these free submissions--for a whole lot less money than it would have cost me to hard-copy mail them a promo kit or even just a CD.

I sometimes do then also do paid SonicBids submissions to bigger venues, if they look like a close enough fit that the odds of us being selected are pretty high. I think our monetary return on these paid submissions has been about $40 to $1. Not a huge return, but compared to most investments, that really ain't bad.

It does distress me that more and more American venues are going to booking web services like SonicBids as the sole means of application. On the other hand, I can understand it from the venue perspective -- much faster to weed through a mess of electronic press kits, all in the same format, looking for the particular characteristics they are looking for, as opposed to pawing through piles and piles of promo kits that have all been done in different formats with different information.

I've also seen this happen in other realms, too. I do a lot of writing--journalism, fiction, poetry--and contests, literary magazines, and now even many small publishers are charging submission and readers fees to get your work considered for publication. More and more print publishers are either not paying at all for content, or paying ridiculous fees like $7 for a business feature with a photo--or, in violation of every ethical rule of journalism I ever learned in my youth, paying the writer only dependent on how much ad copy the ad department can sell related to the article. Similar changes have happened regarding art and photography. You have to pay for space at art shows or in an ever-increasing number of galleries. You are expected to put images up on the web for free for 'exposure'. And on it goes.

I tend to rail against all this because it tells me that we, the 21st century American society, do not value creativity and imagination. We talk a good talk about it, but when it comes to the universal method of showing appreciation--paying in cash--we walk away. I wish that I lived in a culture where art, music, and literature were highly valued and our artists, musicians, and writers were supported with a comfortable income sufficient to allow them to create without worrying where their next month's rent or next beer is coming from. But we ain't on the Island of Avalon, we are in business. And like all businesses, no matter how good you are, you still gotta buy your way in one way or another.

Pay to play -- I don't like it, but it's a practical business decision in which I'm doing the best I can in the environment I find myself working in, and so I do it. Tell my what you think-- Pay to Play, yes, no, depends?