Pay to Play

"Pay to play" (P2P) is a very controversial topic that seems to come up regularly on band forums, and generates strong opinions among musicians.

Many musicians seeking opportunities to perform will, at some point, come across one or more arrangements that involve a financial outlay or obligation on the part of the band to get a booking. Usually, this comes in the form of tickets the band is obligated to sell, i.e., the band has to sell X number of tickets, which are provided by the club, and must either pay up front for them or is expected to turn over the money for them on the day of the show. It's usually presented as a theoretical money-making opportunity: you get the tickets for $X, you sell them for $X+Y, and you keep $Y.

The obvious justification for these deals is, clubs offer them as a form of anti-bullshit insurance. Every band on earth will tell a club owner that they can draw huge throngs of fans to their shows, which is often not actually true. Requiring an unproven band to put its money where its mouth is ensures that if they don't fill the club, at least the club has a few bucks from them as consolation. It's probably enough to pay a bartender and a sound man.

Often, probably most of the time (some people will tell you always), this is not a good deal for the bands involved. Usually of these arrangements are designed to prey on the ignorance or delusion of bands that don't have much business savvy.

The main reason that P2P deals are usually bad is this: any band that could sell enough tickets under one of these arrangements to see any reasonable return, has enough of a draw to get a more favorable deal for themselves---almost certainly, a deal that does not involve that sort of up-front expenditure. So, bands that take these deals are almost by definition bands that don't have the draw to make money from them. Usually the band ends up buying the tickets itself and giving them away, and rationalizing the expense as "exposure" or something like that.

In almost all cases, what's really going on is what I like to call Rock Star Fantasy Camp. A group of people who for one reason or another cannot get themselves a real, paying gig take a P2P gig, knowing or at least suspecting they will lose money, because it lets them feel like they are a real band playing a real show in a real club. It has all the trappings of a real rock gig, with the possible exceptions of an audience, and pay. If the clubs just said, "Give us $X and you can play on the stage for 45 minutes", that would be less attractive because the participants could not suspend disbelief. But couch it in terms where they can theoretically make money if they get a lot of people to buy tickets, and even if it ends up costing them more than $X to do the show, they can maintain the illusion that they've been "hired" to play a "gig" at a club. "Hey, we're real musicians now---we've got a gig!"

I should note that there are a few places where access to a public stage is precious enough that even "real" bands will engage in P2P arrangements. I hear that a number of major rock clubs in Los Angeles, for instance, require ticket sales, and bands with a draw can and do make good money at some of those shows. And at even higher levels, anecdotal evidence suggests that P2P deals are common for support slots on big tours and at festivals. But it seems that in most places, the P2P model is as I've described it above.

Now, I have heard an argument that P2P is killing live music, that once this model gets established, all the clubs go to it and real, good gigs dry up. I don't believe that really happens. The P2P model I've described is a last-ditch, bottom-feeder approach. It's pretty much guaranteed to cap the income from the show for the club at a pretty low level, since often the shows are characterized by (a) bad bands, (b) mismatched bills (incompatible genres on the same show), and (c) minimal audiences consisting of a few personal friends and relatives of the band members, who usually arrive for just one band and leave as soon as it's done playing (due often to factors (a) and (b)). So, if a club could make money running more traditional shows, don't you think they would? But sadly, there are either not enough good bands, not enough of an audience, or both, to keep all the stages in some markets busy with good, profitable shows every night of the week, so some venues and/or some nights go to the P2P model. (Note: this assumes some sort of rational and reasonable businessman running the venue, which may be a bit of a stretch, but there's no accounting for the idiots out there who decide to run their businesses into the ground.)

So I don't think P2P shows are stealing "real" gigs, or that "real" bands are in competition with bands playing P2P shows. That's because they are not "real" shows, they are Rock Band Fantasy Camp. And since Rock Band Fantasy Camp is clearly less profitable for a club that a good "real" show, it only arises because there are not enough good "real" shows to go around. So while I don't advocate most people doing it in most situations, don't get mad at it: it may be keeping a venue for live music going in your area, which may be available in the future, or on certain nights, for real shows.

As far as whether to participate in one of those shows: it's pretty easy to run the numbers and figure out how much if anything you can make. Almost always, it will not be much, probably not enough to justify the effort of coming out and the expense of buying the tickets. But for some bands, it may be as easy a way as anything else if you don't have an established draw and just want to get up on stage and play for friends etc.---if you look at it as stage rental, and figure out how much it would cost to rent a venue and get a sound system to do it elsewhere yourself, it might make economic sense. Just don't tell yourselves you've "gotten a gig".