There's been a lot of buzz the past few days about crowd-funding startup Rabbl's partnership with The Pinch. First described in the Express article, the basic premise is that Rabbl provides a platform for crowd-funding live shows. Enough people buy tickets, the show happens; not enough, no one gets charged. Matt Cohen weighed in on the problems with the model in a DCist article, and there's a bit of a firestorm going on in some of the DC Facebook musician groups and Twitter.
The topic of musician-venue relationship is perennial and contentious. The most common criticism of Rabbl is that it's a pay-to-play model that is taking advantage of bands, and that lazy venues and promoters just want a free lunch where bands do all the work. Lots of comments cited that it's the talent agents' job to match bands based on quality and skill.
Is Rabbl a pay-to-play model? No, as Ally said on WAMU's blog it's not, it's just (at least in this context) not very community friendly. Used correctly, crowd funding of ticket sales reduces risk to both musician and venue - nearly all local bands don't get guarantees, they get door deals, and knowing that X number of people will come to their show before you spend 6+ hours hauling gear, setting up and breaking down is pretty valuable. Really it's not that different from using Kickstarter to fund your next album.
Rabbl did screw up with their collaboration with The Pinch though - it's a tiny local venue and the bands in question are competing head-to-head for an opening slot. That's pretty anti-community, and it's not like you're winning an opening slot at 9:30 Club.
It seems to me that most of this frustration isn't about Rabbl specifically, but the frustration with the difficult process of booking shows and getting paid for them. Some of it comes down to a philosophical question - is the venue hiring you to provide entertainment to their patrons? Or are they selling a service to the band, a way for the band to put on a show to which they can sell tickets? The truth is of course that it's somewhere in between and different for each venue.
If you are being (or trying to be) paid money to play music, your music is a business. As a small business owner, it's up to you to negotiate the deals that work best for you. At the end of the day both the venue and band benefit from more audience coming to a show. I would suggest that there are two things that could help bands get better deals with their live shows. The first is helping bands learn how to run the business side of their music better, both their promo and negotiation with venues. The second is having more conversations between bands and venues on how they can work together to grow both of their businesses.
What next?
With our goal of building musician community, I'd like to see Flashband do more to help musicians with this issue, and I hope to do more with that soon. In the meantime, there's already some of this going on. Fair Trade Music (with Metro Music Source and Listen Local First) is holding a discussion on band/venue relationships June 23. I don't necessarily think that a minimum standard for musician payment is the right solution - I'd push for better band education as a first step- but discussion and sharing of ideas and information is definitely valuable. They're also collecting survey responses on what deals bands have received at local venues. Sharing the results of this survey with the DC musician community would give all of us a helpful tool in navigating the difficult business of making money off performing live music.
