29 August 2009 — Why Venues and Bands Don't Always Get Along
Venues that host live music tend to have slightly uneasy relationships with the bands they book. The owners of live-music venues feel that they would almost certainly make more money if they had DJs or simply iPods playing house music, as they wouldn't rely on the bands pulling a crowd themselves. This is almost certainly true: I obviously haven't seen the figures, but I think it's a safe bet to suggest that Bimbo Deluxe in Fitzroy is a more profitable business than the Punters Club was in the same spot.
Aside from lack of popularity, a number of factors can make a band not draw a crowd: lack of promotion; other gigs on the same night of a similar style; the night of the week; and the number of gigs that the band has played in that area recently. These factors make it quite hard for a venue to accurately gauge whether or not a particular band is worth booking. I would also be interested to see whether a person would spend as much money on alcohol at a concert as they would in a club environment – I wonder whether the structure of performances mean that people are more likely to wait in between songs or sets to buy another drink. Add to this the number of fans of the band who are only prepared to spend money on the door fee – in the jazz scene a large proportion of the audience are often students who can't afford the expensive drinks at jazz clubs. Then there are the additional costs, such as band riders and the maintenance of the sound system. While venues generally take a small cut of the door fee, the understanding is usually that the band gets the money on the door and the venue gets the money the audience spend on drinks. For the above reasons, it is not only unlikely that a band audience will generate as much profit for the venue as the same-sized crowd in a club, it is also hard to imagine that the size of the band audience is likely to be any bigger, over an average week.
Of course, the band tends to see this differently. If they have been around for a while, a band has spent countless hours writing and rehearsing material. Bands spend their own money on petrol, musical instruments worth thousands of dollars, rehearsal studios, recording studios, and publicity. They often have to take time off work if they play interstate, and this eats into their money for things like food and rent (it never cuts into booze money though). When they play a gig to 200 people, or even 30, they see an audience who wouldn't be there if they weren't performing. From their perspective, they're only competing with the crowd-pulling potential of other bands. If there are 30 people, paying $10 a head to get in, the headline act is likely to take home $170, minus the $50 to $100 they owe the sound technician. Assuming they didn't spend any money on publicity – they only got 30 people there after all – that still translates to around $30 per member of a four-piece band, excluding all the costs I mentioned just before. Then to be told that they only get one or two free beers (or none if they're playing in Sydney), well, you can see why so many musicians are depressed.
The problem is, obviously, that neither side is wrong. A band often has to hang around a venue for several hours before they play, it seems fair that they get a free beer or two while they wait to go on stage. On the other hand, the venue manager could look around the room, count their staff, and know that they're barely going to be able to cover the wages. Now, the obvious solution would be to have more popular bands, but this is Melbourne. There are simply too many venues and too many bands for a success story like Little Red to happen at every Wednesday night residency. More importantly, every band has to play to no one at some stage. Is there a solution to this problem? Probably not, but it sometimes surprises me that there aren't more venues and bands coming up with more creative ideas for dealing with the issue.