Boards
A question for people in bands
I'm emailing a few bands that I love at the moment with a question about being in a band. Our situation at the moment is playing with the odd promoters who put on new bands. We enjoy playing any gig, and love playing them regardless of it. All we seem to be playing with is to our mates who we drag down to our gigs so the promoter (along with his opinion of us) wants to book us again.
So, explaining a point to this email, we'd want to play to new crowds.
The types of promoters who we've worked with are the ones who will book gigs depending on a myspace listen, and giving us a night to play on a similar genre. Ranging from pubs to small venues or something similar. We usually drag our mates down who we love very much to meet the promoters requirements of how many people they want.
So we've sort of been left with two options, play outside to fans outside London (where we are), or play with bands who actually have fans, and not just friends of the band.
The problem with the first is dragging people down to see us outside London, it pretty much can't happen on a large scale. Getting double digits of numbers there would be incredible. Friends will always let you down, they can't see them all. All we can really offer is paying our own transport fees and not asking to get paid. My only fear is getting the similar situation as the gigs we already play in London where people will turn up 10 minutes before the band their mates are in and leave straight after.
The problem with the second option is with London being clogged up with bands, and bands tending to play larger venues here and ask another semi known band instead of local bands. As a fan going to these type of gigs, I wouldn't be complaining.
How do you really solve this problem?
We say this, not in the sense that we don't like playing gigs. Every one of them we've loved, as we love playing in a band with my best mates and I love the fact I can play my music and people can listen to appreciate it. Its a fucking awesome feeling. But I do feel that we're sort of stuck playing to the same people, and the same type of shows and its not really going anywhere. We'd like to play something else.
If you've got this far, many thanks for reading this whole post, and feel free to opinionate/attack/agree with anything I've said.
Niall KP