After some lengthy discussion on Facebook about the matter, I'm asking you to incite more discussion. Again.
I for one have never looked towards music to make a mass profit with. When Vindicator play shows, we never ask for a shitload of money, merely enough to cover our costs for petrol - sometimes we don't get it and if that's the case, fair enough. Sometimes we can make the money back from our merchandise, and most merchandise money goes back into more merchandise anyway (or on vermintide's bar tab, drunken rat-bastard that he is). Basically, any money that goes into the band circulates within the band - we don't sell ten shirts and go "Fuck yes, fifty quid! Let's buy a speedboat!", that fifty quid will go right back towards printing more shirts. We have day jobs for day-to-day needs (except me, poor unemployed cunt that I am), HOWEVER if we had the opportunity to realistically make enough money from our work to live off it then we happily would. But we don't bank on it. Our music is, for the most part, up for free too because we just don't think people would pay much attention to an unsigned band if they had to shell out a tenner for their music, unless they knew of them beforehand at least. And in my relatively short time within music, I've witnessed many bands, promoters, labels and the like asking for ridiculously extrotionate prices - one tale a friend regaled me with was that an unsigned band turned up to one show they were playing and demanded a thousand pounds. Venues and bands that charge more akin to 'let's go for a holiday in Denmark for a month once we've been paid' than what's needed for 'travel costs and a bit of profit', and this has naturally sullied my outlook on the whole thing.
The flipside however, is quite the opposite and entirely true in it's own way - bands are well within their right to want to make money from what they do, and if they can do so then their families will want them to make money to pay the bills etc. Being in a band is, essentially, a job and you do your job to make money - since 90% of serious bands are away from home 7 months out of the year or more, they can't hold professions or day jobs with ease so music is left as their fulltime profession. Mathematics, somewhat. Yet how realistic that is, well... it's questionable. Most new bands will make next to fuck all unless they're monumentally huge (see bands like Trivium for a generic example). This is where everything starts to blur a bit.
"It's the music business, not the music friendship"... what do you lot think?
Keep it civil, ladies.
I for one have never looked towards music to make a mass profit with. When Vindicator play shows, we never ask for a shitload of money, merely enough to cover our costs for petrol - sometimes we don't get it and if that's the case, fair enough. Sometimes we can make the money back from our merchandise, and most merchandise money goes back into more merchandise anyway (or on vermintide's bar tab, drunken rat-bastard that he is). Basically, any money that goes into the band circulates within the band - we don't sell ten shirts and go "Fuck yes, fifty quid! Let's buy a speedboat!", that fifty quid will go right back towards printing more shirts. We have day jobs for day-to-day needs (except me, poor unemployed cunt that I am), HOWEVER if we had the opportunity to realistically make enough money from our work to live off it then we happily would. But we don't bank on it. Our music is, for the most part, up for free too because we just don't think people would pay much attention to an unsigned band if they had to shell out a tenner for their music, unless they knew of them beforehand at least. And in my relatively short time within music, I've witnessed many bands, promoters, labels and the like asking for ridiculously extrotionate prices - one tale a friend regaled me with was that an unsigned band turned up to one show they were playing and demanded a thousand pounds. Venues and bands that charge more akin to 'let's go for a holiday in Denmark for a month once we've been paid' than what's needed for 'travel costs and a bit of profit', and this has naturally sullied my outlook on the whole thing.
The flipside however, is quite the opposite and entirely true in it's own way - bands are well within their right to want to make money from what they do, and if they can do so then their families will want them to make money to pay the bills etc. Being in a band is, essentially, a job and you do your job to make money - since 90% of serious bands are away from home 7 months out of the year or more, they can't hold professions or day jobs with ease so music is left as their fulltime profession. Mathematics, somewhat. Yet how realistic that is, well... it's questionable. Most new bands will make next to fuck all unless they're monumentally huge (see bands like Trivium for a generic example). This is where everything starts to blur a bit.
"It's the music business, not the music friendship"... what do you lot think?
Keep it civil, ladies.
All was well, I love such debates.
