For the last six months I have played in and managed a local band in Salt Lake. I have a lot of fun with the band want to help the band succeed and play shows. But I am so frustrated with promoters not doing what they say they will, changing things, not doing what they expect us to do, etc.
After our last show I was promised at least 8 weeks notice before our next show with the same company. After about a month I started calling or emailing once a week to see what was going on and when we would have details about our next show. I didn't get a response for 2+ months so I gave up on them. Some time later a different rep than the one we originally worked with called to schedule a show with us. He was very nice and much more professional however we didn't get the show we were originally promised and were given less than a months notice for the show. We were going to do it anyway but had to cancel because of scheduling conflicts with one of our guitarists.
We tried to schedule another show with a different promoter and were given about a months notice. After we had started promoting and had fans excited for the show the venue cancelled it without giving us reason or returning our calls to see about rescheduling.
We booked another show with the same promoter and were given even less notice (which really frustrated me). The details for the show were very sketchy and now the show is less than two weeks away and we still don't have all the information, emails that were supposedly sent weren't or contained the wrong information so they have had to be resent, etc.
I am so incredibly frustrated. Promoters/venues expect bands to be professional, do things in a timely manner, promote and drive up ticket sales, etc. I have made a very sincere effort to be extremely professional when communicating with these people. I return phone calls/emails. I provide them with all the information they request. I stick with what I tell them. Why is it so hard for them to do the same?
It may not seem like a big deal to others but it really is difficult for me and my band to do our jobs when we aren't treated with the same respect others demand. If we are given less than a months notice about a show we are very limited on the amount of time we can spend having fliers made, passing out fliers, going out and talking to people, organizing group event invitations on MySpace, Facebook, etc.
If information is constantly changing we have to constantly go back and change our fliers/website/blog/etc, inform fans of the changes, possibly refund tickets because of the changes, etc. We all work full time jobs, some of us go to school in addition to that. We don't have the time or resources to deal with that.
We don't/haven't made a dime off of shows so everything is done at our expense. At our last show we made the venue $880 in ticket sales and we didn't get a cent back for it. Fliers are made with our own money. Merchandise is made with my own money. And then everyone we know either intimately or barely at all wants everything for free. People expect us to give them tickets for free (if we did that we would have to buy them with our own money), people want merchandise for free (I have $1,000 of debt on my credit card because of band merchandise, I don't understand why someone expects that they can have my money for free, it is different if they do something to help out the band; I am not going to give you a free shirt for doing my dishes so don't even ask or you're just going to piss me off).
For our show next week our promoter emailed us our tickets and told us to print them out to sell them. I am amazed/disgusted by that. I think that it is very unprofessional of them to expect us to sell people things we printed out at home. It doesn't look good for them or us and it is so easily duplicated that there is no way to regulate what tickets are real and what ones are fake. And it is really cheap of them to not even have real tickets printed.
I am so annoyed!!!
Thanks for letting me vent!
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