Hi

Advice please.

When putting a show, what’s a fair, incentive system to pay bands who bring X amount of fans?

We normally pay bands just a flat fee and look after them with beers etc. We then hope our promotion and the bands we book will attract enough people to cover the costs of gig – venue hire, sound man, rider etc. Naturally we’d like bands to help out a bit as well. The basics like put the gig up on their Myspace/website and tell someone they’re playing the gig in the first place.

However we did a gig recently that lost a considerable amount of money and the bands didn’t pull many people. In fact the majority of people attending had come through our own usual promotional channels. Despite us giving bands cheap and guest lists.

Now, we are starting to do more £ pay on the door/ticketed gigs. We are not in a position to lose money on everyone gig and though we’re not interested in becoming promoter fat cats. I’d like us to breakeven from doing a show. I know it’s a promoters job to promote and of course, we do this.

However I’m now thinking our current approach of just agreeing to pay bands a set fee and hope things workout for everyone isn’t working. Perhaps a new approach is required. Maybe a guarantee fee and if they bring over X amount of fans and then receive a bonus?

Like I said at the start. We want to be fair to all the bands that play and reward them for wanting to help us make the gig a success. However we also want to cover our backs a little.

Thoughts?