Who owns The PA?

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im Interested to know who in your band owns the PA.  I play in a couple of bands the first in which the singer owns and carts the pa.  In the other band I take over this duty - the singer can’t even provide his own mic stand and lead!    I’ve also done the let’s buy the pa as a band with all the fallout over who gets what when people leave. What do you do? 
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  • Our PA is partially owned by our singer and partially bits he borrows from the school he works at. 

    I have been in bands were we have co owned the PA and either I've left or the band has split and I've never seen that money again. Not huge amounts maybe but I'm very wary of joint ownership of PA, maybe it's better if you're in a more 'serious' band. 

    I know that if I started a new band tomorrow one of the biggest hurdles to playing a gig would be the PA. TBH I'm more likely to give up playing than start another band but if I did then I'd almost certainly be better off starting it by looking on eBay for cheap PA gear than advertising for band members. PA is power. 
    Tipton is a small fishing village in the borough of Sandwell. 
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  • My last couple of London bands played small clubs and pubs with our own small PA (400W/400W mixer amp into passive speakers) just for the vocals - drums were loud enough and we made the backline work. Larger places provided a house PA.

    We all (we started as a trio) owned the mixer/amp, speakers, stands, cables and mic leads. It cost us approx £250 each at the time (2006). Everyone owned their own mic stand and mic. When that band added a singer, the three of us remained the owners - she provided her own mic stand and mic. Then people moving away morphed us into changing the type of band we were (from standard covers to prog covers). We agreed on a second hand value for the PA and the drummer and I bought out the bass player - the one who was moving away. So now, just he & I owned it. I stored it, and transported it to gigs when we needed our own PA. 

    When that band folded as a result of three out of five of us moving out of London within 3 months of each other, we agreed a value and I bought out the drummer, as he was retiring from playing and I was not. I seem to remember it cost me £100 in 2013 to become the outright owner. 

    I stopped using it in 2015 and sold it last year for £300 or so. 

    We never factored the PA into anything relating to income vs expenses and never ran "band" accounts. We weren't busy enough to need the hassle. 
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  • RolandRoland Frets: 8590
    When I joined them six years ago the band jointly owned a pa, desk, powered speakers, speaker stands, sub, and monitors.

    About three gigs in one of the speaker amps failed. We swapped it for the SRM450 which I was using for personal monitoring that night. Thereafter we’ve always used my speakers and stands. If one were to fail then the band would cover the repair bill.

    This year we bought a digital desk out of earnings. Whilst it sounds great I have doubts about its life expectancy, and it has very little resale value.

    We each fund our personal equipment, for example mics and stands. A couple of years ago we switched to IEMs. The band bought transmitters and receivers, funded through earnings and sale of the monitors. We each bought our own headsets.

    If the band folded then we would sell off the jointly owned gear. Resale is less than £800, shared between five. If someone decided to leave then the jointly owned gear would stay with the band. There’s not enough resale value to argue about.

    Tree recycler, and guitarist with  https://www.undercoversband.com/.
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  • John_PJohn_P Frets: 2744
    I’m not a fan of joint ownership with the risk of falling out over something petty - the ideal for me is each person owns something that contributes to the whole rig and that also spreads out the hassle of transporting and storing it.    
    I have decent PA I hire out to other bands when I’m not gigging so that income makes up for the cost of owning it but I play with a couple of other bands where the singer has a decent rig as well.  
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  • We were all friends going way back to secondary school before we started the current band I'm in. We have all played together over the years in various lineups. We have been going for 6 years now in our current line up. To get us going in the beginning we cobbled together a good enough PA (Me and the singer both owned Mackie speakers).

    Very early on we managed to secure a contact with a local bar which secured us a gig every 6 weeks throughout the year, this contract was over 2 years. We made the decision then to splash out on a quality PA, so we went out and bought a KV2 PA on interest free credit at a cost of £10,000, the gigs covered the monthly payments.

    It was probably the best thing we ever did as we have had trouble free excellent sound which has helped to secure some lucrative gigs over the proceeding years.

    We all agreed that if the band were ever to split up we would sell the stuff and split the money.

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