Sneaky pay2play (uk uprising)

PolarityMan

So I got an email about a botb style competition that sounded pretty good, sponsored by Jack Dniels, prize support from blackstar and ernie ball. Consists of 3 rounds of regional heats followed by final in London with the winner getting a weeks expense paid tour.

Sounds pretty good so I signed up, put in info including personal details and phone number, only at this point the the fuckers admit its a pay to play

Scamming mother fuckers.

johnnyurq

What a crock the chiselling twats.

digitalscream

Surface is/was like this (don't know if they're still going, but they announced the 2013 competition and then seemed to disappear). The first round is £50 entry, redundable if you sell enough tickets. After that, it's zero cost...and if you get through the first few rounds you really do pick up a lot of exposure if you manage it right.

From that perspective...might it be worth the initial investment?

Cirrus

Or alternatively, spend the time and effort arranging your own gigs and make your own media contacts. Hell, hire a PR company if "exposure" is what you want. Do it right, don't do a half assed version that involves handing your money to chumps that don't believe in paying for entertainment.

digitalscream

Cirrus said:

Or alternatively, spend the time and effort arranging your own gigs and make your own media contacts. Hell, hire a PR company if "exposure" is what you want. Do it right, don't do a half assed version that involves handing your money to chumps that don't believe in paying for entertainment.

It's not necessarily that - my last band did Surface, and I was incredibly skeptical about it. However, we ended up getting to the semi-finals, and we made friends with a few bands and by the end there was a lot of cross-promotion going on. The difference between competitions and normal gigs is that there's a big incentive to get more fans to competition gigs and the fans themselves see it as something more "special", so they turn up in much bigger numbers and get more into it (instead of the usual bullshit of turning up to see their mates and then buggering off as soon as they've played).

At the start of the competition, we had about 300 fans on Facebook, most of whom were friends and family and rarely bothered interacting with us. By the time we ran out of steam at the semis we had about 750, half of whom were active fans (as opposed to almost none before it). Because they were spread all over the country, we also had quite a few of them turning up to our subsequent gigs and bringing their friends.

That was all from five gigs. I've never seen that sort of response from five normal gigs.

I know it's traditional to say that all pay-to-play gigs are shit exploitation and not worth bands' time, but sometimes it pays to consider how you can exploit it to your advantage.

In any case...what about all the bands who pay a buy-in to get on big tours (ie most of them)? That's pay-to-play too...

PolarityMan

digitalscream said:

In any case...what about all the bands who pay a buy-in to get on big tours (ie most of them)? That's pay-to-play too...

I guess at least in that case you know what you'll get for you money. In this case the venue is one we play fairly regularly and it has zero passing trade at all, in fact it's recently been losing a lot of it's signed fri/sat night gigs to other local venues.

digitalscream

PolarityMan said:

digitalscream said:

In any case...what about all the bands who pay a buy-in to get on big tours (ie most of them)? That's pay-to-play too...

I guess at least in that case you know what you'll get for you money. In this case the venue is one we play fairly regularly and it has zero passing trade at all, in fact it's recently been losing a lot of it's signed fri/sat night gigs to other local venues.

Ah, that's fair enough. I wouldn't ever consider a pay-to-play competition which doesn't have a decent national setup (and can actually deliver on its promises). Surface used to be that competition - enough that I was aiming to do it this year with the new band - but it just seems to have died without warning. Its entire web presence appears to have been abandoned...shame, really.

PolarityMan

I wonder if this is a replacement, it's 10 cities with london final. (its here btw www.ukuprising.co.uk)

If it's such a great deal it makes me wonder why you dont find out its pay to play tuntil you've signed up, given phone number etc.

digitalscream

OK, I've just found it...it does look very much like the Surface setup (only probably with better gear, since it's now Blackstar instead of bottom-of-the-range Marshall crap).

Gotta say, though, I just signed up with an email address and at the top of the News section there's a piece on the difference between an entry fee and pay-to-play; doesn't look like they're trying to hide it to me.

In fact, I may have a go at it...at the end of the day, it's right - putting on something of that magnitude does require a certain amount of cash, because there's a lot more to organise than a normal gig. Besides...£25 is less than my band spend on beer on gig nights (and Surface was £50).