I want to start this off stating that I got all love for everyone I perform with and this isn’t about anyone in particular.
However as time goes on I participate in show after show where it feels like the musical talent is not drawing the crowds it deserves.
I am left to question what we can do differently. People judge promoters for putting 15 people on a lineup, yet shows with less people tend to not draw enough to make the venues happy. I’ve seen several venues shut shows down early because there were only 15-30 people in the room.
My experiences are mostly limited to underground English Hip Hop shows in Montreal, but from what I can tell these issues are more widespread than local.
I love performing. The people I perform with love performing. I think we all need to rethink how these underground shows work and face some real deal realities. Instead of blame games, let’s start upping the game on how we do things.
Remember our mission needs to be to show people our concerts are fun experiences, we need some FOMO.
Most underground promoters are not actually promoters
There’s this crazy expectation that the people organizing the lower end of shows have some magical experience.
They are honestly just artists that are frustrated with existing opportunities trying to do better. They throw some shows and find out right quick why certain OGs move the way they do. Say what you will, but pay to play certainly filters out a lot of people that aren’t serious.
The ones who are organizing these shows tend to not really be tapped into the scene. They are artists who have seen the corner they know and are trying to break out further. Most of the time, the person is not someone with experience throwing events and making money off it.
Then the artists agree to do these shows, assuming that the person throwing the show knows how to market it. They do not know how to market it, they are booking you hoping you can bring people based on the strength of your name. Then the day of, the promoter expects the artists to bring people and the artist is mad the promoter failed to promote the show correctly and overall it feels less than what it could be.
This is not working. As much as many people want to act like this is the way it is, the way it is bleeds money. People become jaded and stop liking their rapper peers. Okay that time people was me. Took me a while to want to come back out again after trying my hand as a promoter.
None of us really know what we are doing.
Most artists should know how to sell themselves
In theory if you get booked to do a show, you should be able to convince people that you are worth coming to see perform.
In theory you have music videos, live video footage, a catalogue of music out and merch ready. If you are missing those things, I encourage you to perform, but perhaps you aren’t at the level where you should be mad at promoters for being trash. When you get booked for a show you should put some effort into making that show sound hype.
For the upcoming CY charity show I got several goofy social media posts I’m going to create that play with the idea of being charitable. Now if every other artist on the lineup also goes out of their way to drop like 6 Reels each, related to being charitable and sharing love in a hype show at Blue Dog on December 7th, maybe we bust that place past capacity.
Then when we are there, if we all spam the stories like this is what you are missing, we can create our own hype. Because we are artists. We are the lit people that the fans want to come out and support.
While I don’t think it is easy to sell yourself in music, it is something we need to stop pushing off to promoters and other people. A promoter should probably be able to get a sizable number of people into the room. However as an artist you should have a plan to market the things you are booked at to increase your value.
Both these things can be true at once but let’s put these two sections together now.
We don’t have promoters in the scene we just have ourselves to build with
This is not to take shots at folk like Rickey D and DMS who do a lot of stuff to create vibes and are examples of successful promotion companies.
They aren’t at the dive bars and 100 person crowds. Those are established brands where people who have built themselves up can hustle for a spot. It’s honestly not the route for beginners.
When we get into the tier below, everything I said becomes true. For the most part we are promoter deficient and artist rich. Any time we get booked for a show, it tends to be from each other. Then we get mad at each other and whine about how each other sucks. It’s pretty broken.
The solution is as artists we need to like each other more publicly. It doesn’t really matter who likes who behind the scenes. You can hate my fucking guts but if we’re in the same lineup, we should be cordial and hype each other up. That way we both make the biggest bag possible. The biggest cancers to our scene are the artists who will tank a show over ego.
The entire lineup should link up for a promo run and film a bunch of content together. The entire lineup should take the time to introduce themselves in a meaningful way. We also need to acknowledge that until our names are hustling tickets on their own, we’re virtual nobodies to the masses at large.
I guess what I’m saying is when push comes to shove, we need to try harder collectively to build this foundation.
Or we can chill with a status quo we don’t like.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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