sunday was my bands first show back in the states after coming back from our month-long Japan tour. nothing says 'welcome back to the States' like a battle of the bands, right? well not only that, it was a typical LA/OC set up: crappy.
the way that most gigs go in LA/OC is what's called "pay-to-play". promoters try to hide it by just saying that you have to sell tickets to pay off what you owe. haha, "what you owe." it's funny that we owe money for providing entertainment! it was bad for us before, but now that we've been to a place where a venues entertainment is treated as such (with respect and with a real opportunity to make money, a SOUNDCHECK, thorough communication about the agenda of the show, etc.), we are even more disappointed in the way that things are run here in our home town by promoters that don't do much in the way of promotion...
it's not so much that things are run so differently from the business-side of things; the live houses do indeed have to make money. so many of them have a minimum ticket sales amount (10 was the highest we saw all month), and after that, rather than giving bands everything, they split the earnings evenly. you also pay after your show, giving you a chance to have your fans actually come to the venue and support you with out a band having to deliver all of the tickets in the weeks/days before the show or pay out of pocket straight away for your fans that are coming... it makes it more so that you don't have to know all your fans' numbers... maybe expanding your fanbase? (what a concept!)
the real battle now is the fight for change in these corrupted business practices. the music scene has gotten so bad here because of these money-grubbing corporate whores that have ruined it. they main problem is that they apparently don't care about music that won't make them loads of cash; i.e. sugar-sweet pop. (what those of us working really hard to do our own thing call "selling out". we were actually told to do this by the judges at the aforementioned battle... sad. also! they told us that this was the only way that we would make it in the music business! flat out! i was appalled, but it was news that i already knew about the state of the business, sadly.)
how do we affect change? pooling together those involved to force it upon those holding the infrastructure in place! we did a radio show last night at Flash Rock internet radio that made me hopeful. please check it out!
anyway, i'm not really sorry about the rant, but i hope that it was informative and not just stupid... like a lot of rants can be. until then---