Lemonrock - Opinions?

[Chienmortbb]

I get emails from Lemonrock telling me about gigs in my area and I have found venues that I was unaware of. My question is, is it worth joining, do you get gigs from it?

[Silvia Bluejay]

Yes.

[Phil Starr]

We get a steady trickle of gigs from Lemonrock.

 

I'm a big fan of the Lemonrock model. It was started by Mac who was/is a gigging musician and starting with local bands. Basically the model is that it is a gig guide for the public to find live gigs. No advertising or data mining it is paid for by bands and venues with gigs to plug and bookings sought and found. The thought was that if it achieved critical mass and most of the local live music gigs were on there then it would become the one stop shop for pub bands and local live gigs. Membership is £42 a year for bands, free for punters looking for gigs. For that you get a Web Page with mp3's videos pics and details of your band. If you fill in the calendar you turn up in searches when the venues look for bands and anyone can have a look at you and listen to what you do. Any local music fans get emails and texts etc about any gigs your do. If I'm bored on a Fri and Sat I can find a choice of about 20-50 local bands to go and see in this rural area. It's quite useful as a research tool as well, you can look for bands like yours and see where they are getting gigs and who is working hardest. Technical support is good too for what is essentially a cottage industry. It used to have a real community feel about it with a lively forum which probably rivalled the activity on BC a few years back. Unfortunately that was lost.

 

it works well in areas where the majority or at least a sizeable minority of local bands have joined. It was growing steadily right up to the covid outbreak, gradually spreading across the country and building numbers. In areas like this chunk of the West Country or the area North East of London where it started it is pretty strong. There are enough bands on down here that many of the pubs only book through Lemonrock and a lot of others g straight there if they have a cancellation. I'd pick up about 6 bookings a year via LR when I did the bookings which if you turn them into repeat bookings is pretty much job done after a couple of years. I also turn down quite a few as they tend to be last minute . You get regular reports too on traffic

 

this is this weeks report for my Duo

 

Hits - all current gigs :0

 

Band page hits this week :71

Band page hits this month :204

Band page hits this year :9,835

  

Total Band page hits :12,194

 

We are a fairly new and I  haven't a gig booked in the next couple of weeks.  we've only done about half a dozen gigs this year and a couple last year so  that's 1800 hits per gig which is extraordinary. With no gigs this week the 70 odd hits on the band page will be potential bookers .

 

How effective Lemonrock is though depends upon presence, if every band in you area joined it would be perfect for you, all the punters would visit to find gigs and all the venues would look there for bands because all the bands would be there. It's a properly maintained site so the information is reliable and searchable unlike a lot of social media and as it is a subscription site it is all semi pro and pro bands. The down side is that if there are only a handful of bands and venues it misses most of the gigs so the punters don't look so it depends for growth on early adopters and a gradual spread out from the places it is strong. I think it made a mistake by ending the forum, it lost the community feel so there was no loyalty when covid struck and all the gigs were cancelled. £42 seemed like a lot of money and a lot of bands cancelled. I'd suggest anyone looking just searches for gigs near them this week, if it's only a handful then LR isn't strong near you, if there are enough to fill a couple of pages you are probably missing out on bookings.

[PaulWarning]

waste of time for the east midlands, is there an alternative?

[tauzero]

11 hours ago, PaulWarning said:

waste of time for the east midlands, is there an alternative?

 

And the west midlands too, and the counties therein.

[Franticsmurf]

Just had a quick look at the site and there's nothing in Wales. Shame because it looks like a decent resource. 

[Silvia Bluejay]

You guys are correct re. Lemonrock being very much limited to, basically, London, Beds, Bucks, Berks and a bit of Herts. Fantastic resource if you're in or around those areas, pretty pointless otherwise.

 

Definitely worth googling to see if there are one or more equivalent websites/communities in your particular areas. You will obviously find a lot of agency type websites who only look for tribute and function bands and members for function bands' ever-rotating line-ups, and they cost a fortune to join, but there may be non-agency ones that more closely resemble Lemonrock.

[Phil Starr]

Also good in Devon and Somerset where I think they took over another website in their early days. It’s a shame they’ve lost a bit of their ‘community feel’. When I joined years back it was because all the other local bands urged me to join and we all urged punters to join at gigs.
 

[Silvia Bluejay]

I think Mac had to close the discussion forum because of the increasing number of trolls and spammers, and he had no time to moderate it as well as running and improving the site itself.

[skidder652003]

we have used it for years. Got lots of gigs from it, even now.

1 gig from it pays for 7 or 8 years of membership.

Miss the community forum but I think it got a bit ugly in the end and had to be moderated too much.

TBH it also works as a diary for the upcoming gigs as much as anything and as a resource for who is playing where and nicking some slots its great!

[Phil Starr]

8 hours ago, Silvia Bluejay said:

I think Mac had to close the discussion forum because of the increasing number of trolls and spammers, and he had no time to moderate it as well as running and improving the site itself.

It wasn't any worse than BassChat but there were a few heated posts when some of the venues cancelled gigs at the last minute or refused to pay bands. Mac was trying to get the venues to join at the time so he obviously wasn't comfortable with that. I offered to be a moderator and I may have 'volunteered' a couple of other people like @skidder652003 as others who might have helped.

 

Coming from the not-for-profit sector I'm predisposed to think its a good way of organising a small venture like Lemonrock or BassChat. The people doing all the work can be paid the going rate for the job and volunteers can add value.  The collective nature of the enterprise means that in difficult times people are more willing to donate to keep something they love alive and thriving. It also offers a way of the organisation surviving when the initiating group moves on. 

[Phil Starr]

6 hours ago, skidder652003 said:

as a resource for who is playing where and nicking some slots its great!

That's the truth

 

[Silvia Bluejay]

3 minutes ago, Phil Starr said:

It wasn't any worse than BassChat but there were a few heated posts when some of the venues cancelled gigs at the last minute or refused to pay bands. Mac was trying to get the venues to join at the time so he obviously wasn't comfortable with that. I offered to be a moderator and I may have 'volunteered' a couple of other people like @skidder652003 as others who might have helped.

 

Coming from the not-for-profit sector I'm predisposed to think its a good way of organising a small venture like Lemonrock or BassChat. The people doing all the work can be paid the going rate for the job and volunteers can add value.  The collective nature of the enterprise means that in difficult times people are more willing to donate to keep something they love alive and thriving. It also offers a way of the organisation surviving when the initiating group moves on. 

I hear what you say, but he doesn't seem to have that approach even now, he's still the one who does most of the work, I don't think he has a large team around him, and those who are there are probably admin and perhaps a coder (Mac is the main coder still, as far as I know). When discussions and arguments arise in a forum about venues cancelling and/or not paying, the main potential problem is probably libel/slander and life's complicated enough without having to firefight stuff like that....

[Phil Starr]

1 hour ago, Silvia Bluejay said:

I hear what you say, but he doesn't seem to have that approach even now, he's still the one who does most of the work, I don't think he has a large team around him, and those who are there are probably admin and perhaps a coder (Mac is the main coder still, as far as I know). When discussions and arguments arise in a forum about venues cancelling and/or not paying, the main potential problem is probably libel/slander and life's complicated enough without having to firefight stuff like that....

He's a lovely guy IME I'm really pleased he's stuck with it and he's great when you have a problem. Lemonrock is such a useful resource when it is strong in your area. I'd hate to see it go under. And yeah I'm sure you are right Sylvie. In the end the forum just got too time consuming and stressful.