In 2023 we got robbed by our first promoter. We had previously worked with this person and the end result was supposed to be a cool opportunity opening for someone from the USA.
I know some people get mad that the opening slots go to people who “don’t deserve it”. I guess I must be included in that list since I held quite a few of those slots last year. But deserving an opportunity is a strange concept. You either earn it or you don’t, like every other job out there.
When you don’t get the opportunities you want, what will you do differently to achieve new ones?
Whole lot of pay to play out there
I have both paid to rap and been paid to rap. I much prefer the version where I receive money but like many things, music is a business, and sometimes you need to invest to grow.
Usually the pay for play version I’ve experienced uses ticket sales as a means to cover the paying to play. You pay with your time and effort to hustle the tickets rather than your cash upfront. If you are wise about it, you pay with your own cash when you don’t sell enough tickets to create an illusion of popularity.
Every promoter worth a damn is tracking your ticket sale scorecard. They look at the number of listeners you get, not views, but listeners in the geo you are in. My stats are telling people I can maybe sell 2 tickets in Montreal.
I respect that my online portfolio is not screaming out, book me. While people believe it’s all about the numbers in a bad way, the people who complain about that tend to also have bad numbers. Get your numbers up the way you should get your money up.
Until then, we have the various pay for play opportunities that exist. Promoters need to recoup, especially in a city like ours where the ticket sales are lower than even Ottawa for most of the low end Hip Hop shows on a tour. The last time we worked with this promoter, we sold the most tickets at that show and definitely paid our fair due.
The key thing is we got tickets to sell, nothing was asked for up front.
Sign a contract before a deposit
This time it was different. The opportunity was to open for an American artist on New Year's Eve. If you follow my life, you know I did not perform yesterday.
We were told that we would need to pay 1000$ total, and only 250$ upfront to secure the slot. I sent my 125$ to cover half the deposit, in good faith, as already there was talk of a contract. There wasn’t a contract yet, but we were discussing one.
Once this person received the money, we were told that the contract & details would come soon. We were prepared to walk in with the full money on NYE and deliver the best set we’d ever done.
Then we played the wait for information game. Time passed without updates. Everything got pushed week to week and I can assure you we were sweating. End result is the promoter ghosted us entirely. Poof, his Instagram account was gone.
In that moment it was clear we’d been finessed. The man robbed us of our 250$ deposit and ran away into the sunset with our money. The same man we previously earned 800$ for in ticket sales.
Lot of waiting in the show game
When we opened for Dave East, we were also left in the dark. My understanding (this is speculation) is that they were not selling enough to make the bread to cover the show and it nearly got cancelled. Then they added like 3 more people (some of which had to pay what we owed in ticket sale money) and voila the show was back.
To be doubly clear, no one from the Dave East show camp robbed us.
We were left in the dark for weeks and only ended up getting the tickets less than a month before the show. With our past experiences, we thought it would be something like that. Bad communication but when all is said and done we’d be opening for someone very much worth it to us in Montreal.
Turns out the tour was announced and never ended up coming to Montreal. We saw shows on flyers in other parts of Canada, but nothing for us in the 514. I’m left without my 125$ investment and the shame of knowing I got duped.
I’m not going to name the guy on my blog. But I’ll tell some of you who it was in private. The moral of the story is, sign some contracts before you send bread into the abyss.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone.