Two Promotors One Pod

[SteveXFR]

I've been listening to this podcast for a while now. I find it really interesting hearing about the music industry from a promotors point of view, hearing their challenges, difficulties and the positives. Anyone else here a listener?

 

 

 

[jonno1981]

It’s great and very enlightening. Enjoyed the episode where they talked about the actual cost of putting on the festival and booking the bands. Seems like it’s drastically changed lately. The Scottish fella swears a bit excessively but that’s just the way he is I suppose. 

[SteveXFR]

@jonno1981 the costs are pretty shocking. It must be tricky to make it all add up to a small profit 

Edited October 24 by SteveXFR

[BigRedX]

Why anyone would want to put on an outdoor festival in the UK is a complete mystery to me. We simply don't have weather that is conducive to having them. A weekend of bad weather can completely wipe you out if haven't sold enough tickets beforehand. This is what happened to a festival run by someone I know. They had a couple of excellent years and then got more ambitious for the third which unfortunately coincided with several days of heavy rain. The site was looking pretty waterlogged on the Saturday when my band played, and by Sunday it had been cancelled. IME the successful festivals in the UK are ones that are strictly indoor only.

 

The other problem for promotors is that if you want to grow your event you'll find that costs start spiralling pretty quickly. For a couple of years I was involved with a monthly night put on by the band I was in at the time. Initially it was simple to organise. We could get a reasonably well-known up and coming band within our chosen genres for less than £200. Our band played support. Admission was free and we got a percentage of the bar takings. Even on our worst night we still made more than enough to cover the costs of putting on the gig. Unfortunately we became a victim of our own success. After a couple of months when we packed out the venue, we were told that the audience sizes were on the verge of becoming dangerous and it would be best if we looked for somewhere bigger. The cost and logistics of doing this were considerably higher, and therefore we started looking at more popular bands. It was a this point we discovered that booking a band that we could reasonably expect to draw enough people to cover the runnings costs was heading towards £1k. That wasn't the kind of money we could afford to loose and at that point we needed everything we were making as a band to pay for recording our album. Therefore we stopped being promotors.

 

My experience of promotors recently is that none of them do it for a living. Like most of the bands they put on they are happy so long as it's not actually costing them money. They keep the events small and well-targeted, and they know their audience and which bands within the genre have the required pulling power to make a gig work.

[Stofferson]

18 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

IME the successful festivals in the UK are ones that are strictly indoor only.

 

Erm, Bloodstock, Download, Leeds, Reading, Glastonbury, Bearded Theory, Stonedead, Call of the Wild ??

 

[SteveXFR]

@BigRedX Arctangent Festival, run by James in the podcast always gets at least one day of heavy rain but sells out (10,000 tickets) every year. Its possibly helped by being a small site with all stages in tents so there's not much trudging about outside. He said in one episode he doesn't want to go bigger, he doesn't see it being profitable if he has to book bigger bands. 

I think all the most successful UK festivals are outdoors despite the weather. Glastonbury seems to do OK and is often soaked.

[BigRedX]

I suppose my view is clouded by the fact that I don't like outdoor festivals and these days I couldn't see myself attending any as a punter, partly because I don't trust the weather and partly because most of the bands I like are much better appreciated in a small indoors venue. As a performer I'll do them, but my preferred method would be to turn up as late as the festival schedule allows and to leave as soon as we have finished playing.

[SteveXFR]

My daughters band played four or five outdoor festivals this year. It was great, we made it a full day out each one, watched loads of bands, met loads of musicians, nerded out over gear, they enjoyed playing to bigger than normal audiences, hundreds watching them instead of a small crowd in a pub and they got more bookings out of each one.

[BigRedX]

I've done 5 festivals so far this year with one more coming at the end of November, and most were indoors. Luckily the two outdoor events we played were graced with decent weather. However everything about the organisation and logistics for them was less than optimum. There were no facilities for getting changed before we played - for the first event I travelled and set up in my stage gear which wasn't very comfortable or convenient, and so for the second one I wore something more practical that also looked reasonably decent for our on-stage image. Also they were organised in such a way that you set up, did 30 seconds of a song to check the foldback, and then played. Again there were problems at the first where our singer thought we were still sound checking when in fact we'd just done the first song in the set!

 

Compare that to the indoor festivals where in each case there were proper changing rooms for the bands and backstage areas for safely storing the gear and relaxing if you didn't feel like watching the other bands, and even the opportunity to do a full soundcheck before the audience arrived. And while I can't deny that as a band all the events have been useful in terms of growing our audience and networking with other bands and promotors and even selling a decent amount of merchandise, I doubt I'd have attended any of them if I hadn't been playing.

 

Eight or Nine years ago The Terrortones did a whole "summer" season of festivals. It rained at every single one often with detrimental results for both the performance and audience numbers, apart from one where we played indoors. At one event it was so cold that I was glad of my leather jacket stage wear and our guitarist played the whole set wearing gloves! At another our set up on stage was entirely dictated by having to avoid rainwater leaking through the roof. After every event I had to clean the mud off all my cabs and cases. 

 

For most of the 80s I was involved in organising a fairly large 2-day festival in Nottingham. Luckily we had city and county council funding and additional sponsorship from local firms which covered all the costs, so none of the event organisers had their personal money on the line. However it was still lots of hard and mostly thankless work. I certainly wouldn't want to get involved in something like that again unless I was guaranteed a substantial sum of money for my efforts.

[Graham]

I really enjoy the podcast; I've been acquainted with Gav for years as I've been going to Damnation since 2007 and have becone part of their volunteer crew and am the admin for their Facebook group so already have an interest in the festival, but it's still a very enjoyable listen

 

It's Damnation this coming weekend, anyone up to Manchester for it?