This tale is about the inside of the music business, which, for audience members, is sort of like seeing how sausages are made – it might not ruin your appetite, but you really have to forget about it to enjoy your meal. So I apologize in advance for anyone whose appreciation I might diminish – you’re welcome to skip ahead to the gig listings :-). But if you’re interested in what the sausage looks like from the ingredients’ point of view, read on.
There’s this Web site called Sonicbids, and it’s evil. Evil, evil, evil. The idea of Sonicbids is that you set up an electronic press kit – an EPK – and you can reply to gig solicitations online. Setting up the EPK is free! That must be good, right? Well, um, it costs $50 a year after the free trial is over, and replying to gig solicitations isn’t necessarily free. Sometimes it is; but sometimes it costs money. But it’s great, see, because your EPK has everything to get you booked – bio, music samples, photos, everything. Saves you all sorts of time and money – no running to the post office, no giving away sample CDs. So come on down!
Why am I telling you this story today, of all days? I mean, even though I cancelled my Sonicbids account immediately after my free trial, I still get weekly emails touting the successes that people have had with Sonicbids. I could have written this article, oh, years ago. Well, last night I was chatting with a friend of mine last night, and he reported that he got his first Sonicbids gig, at a coffeehouse in Connecticut. And this just reminded me of how much I hate Sonicbids.
See, it turns out, if you go to the Sonicbids Web site, that this coffeehouse charges $2 to submit an EPK. Now, who gets that money? It used to go to the post office; it used to go to sunken costs for CDs you reproduced. In other words, it used to go to people who had no motivation to raise the cost of submitting to gigs. But now, now it goes to the venue. Ooh, says the venue; here’s a new source of income. And venue accounts are free on Sonicbids, forever. And the venue can make Sonicbids its exclusive submission channel. No more CDs littering the desk in the back room. And they get $2 every time someone presses that button.
I think you’re beginning to see why Sonicbids is such an evil venture. It’s entirely – entirely – for the benefit of the venues. It’s counting on the network effect – people set up EPKs because they’re convenient, and venues solicit EPKs because they get a little money out of it, and all of a sudden, there’s no other way to get gigs, and another few bucks gets bled from the pockets of the people who are, as usual, last in line to get paid. It’s just pay-to-play, with an evil little twist – it’s pay-to-submit. The venue gets a few bucks from everyone who submits a press kit, not just the people who actually get on stage. In that way, it’s even more insulting that pay-to-play.
And in the end, it’s not even good for the venues. On one of the mailing lists I subscribe to, a booker reported “Most of the Sonicbid submissions I get might as well be spam.” By reducing the overhead of submitting for gigs – the venue doesn’t have to charge money, after all – you end up getting lots and lots of crap, people submitting who are entirely inappropriate for the venue. And they all look the same, dammit. That’s just one more motivation to recreate some sort of barrier. Oh, say, a $2 submission fee.
In other words, we, the musicians, are the suckers in this scenario. Why? Because we’re the ones who need the venues, not the other way round. The venues are opportunities to do what we love to do – but the venues, by and large, are businesses. If music doesn’t break even for them, then they won’t have music. If they really like live music, but they’re losing money at it, well, it’s a shame that the music has to go, but business is business. For them, it’s regrettable; for us, it’s a little bit of death, because it’s not a business for us, so much as a passion that we’re trying to keep from sending us to the poorhouse. There’s an old joke where a folk musician wins the lottery, and someone asks her what she’s going to do, and she says, “I’ll just keep being a folk musician until the money runs out.” It’s that mentality – that desperate need to perform our music – that makes it easy for organizations like Sonicbids to prey on us.
I will, grudgingly, admit that for certain situations – songwriting competitions, for instance – something like Sonicbids is no more onerous than the current system. You already have to pay some money; you already have to submit a standard form. But it’s still a benefit to the organization, not to us. Sonicbids provides absolutely no service to me that I need. I have an on-line press kit – it’s on my Web site. Everything that anyone needs to book me is right there. And, unlike Sonicbids, it’s my branding – my banner, my navigation links. It doesn’t look like everyone else’s press kit. Sonicbids charges me money for something I used not to pay for. And it encourages more venues to pick my pocket, and to see me looking like everyone else. I will never, ever, ever give them a penny of my money. And if you’re a musician, you shouldn’t, either. It’s as worthless without musicians as it is without venues. We can kill Sonicbids – and we should.