A couple of years ago, my friends and I who were in bands pretty much just got sick and tired of not getting any shows (I think it has a lot do with the kind of music we play, metal, hardcore, noisy stuff). So we decided that enough was enough and decided to organize one on our own. We had no idea what we were doing from the get go but learnt the ropes pretty fast. We needed a name for this organizing committee of ours and decided to call it the Rockstar Collective, just for fun and it included the guys from I Am David Sparkle, Castles, Marchtwelve, Plain Sunset, Unvisual, Dyfectra, 59 Minutes and a couple more bands.
After organizing our first show we realized that it was pretty easy to do one so we decided to keep doing it and before anyone could say “holy cow, batman”, we were doing shows for our friends from Malaysia, Nepal and Japan and then went on to do many other shows which include co-producing the first 6 years of Baybeats.
My point is that bands should be willing to get their hands dirty if they want to play more shows. Desperate people are willing to desperate things, like pay to play, but they should also be desperate enough to learn how to organize shows by themselves. It’s not impossible and it’s not hard. The coolest thing about bands doing shows on their own is that you are totally cutting the middle person out, who in this case is the organizer, and whatever profits you make will directly go towards the bands. But with that said, do know that we didn’t start doing this for the money. We did it because we just wanted to have fun and to give our selves more opportunity to play, which I believe, should be the main goal anyway. And if any band is too lazy to do it themselves, and would rather just wait for opportunities to come to them, should really rethink on staying as a band.
All you need is a group of bands that has the same goal and vision and you. If you have 5-6 bands in this collective of yours, which I figured would be around 30 people, each member only has to fork out $16 to book a place like Crawlspace for 4 hours with each band getting a half an hour slot with one more hour as a “filler”. And whatever money you earn from the door could either go to the bands or into a “show fund” in which you can use in the future to make more shows with the bands that are in your collective.
So go ahead and D.I.Y and have fun doing it.
