It's tricky to be in this business of being the booking coordinator of a venue without receiving both the kudos or blame of how any given night turns out.... I do my best to try to book the venue according to whatever else heavy is going on in the city.... Invariably, as hard as you try to book in advance and list your show genre early, almost always some other promoter or venue will book against you.... This is progressively getting worse with former hipster haunts suddenly lauding the punk and metal subcultures ... I guess they realize we're hearty drinkers with an abundance of bands to fill a night of live music...
Now you'd think in a city of 600,000 people, not to mention the population of the suburbs, that this really shouldn't be an issue... When looking at Vancouver's numbers you have to dwindle down to how many people attend the bigger heavy arena type shows.... Now if you take that number and subtract 75 per cent, you get to a number of true subculture supporters that will take a fly on local and touring heavy bands... Now, then divide that by how many times you get booked against and you'll actually see the gauntlet that a small, heavy music dedicated venue is up against.... Varied nests of shows with screaming beaked bands competing for the same few hundred hardcore worms....
When answering the hard revenue questions from the venue owners on if your subculture mandate and preferred style of booking really flies it gets tricky especially with this rash of summer weather we've been having.... People are camping / at the beach / at house party barbecues and don't tend to come out to a show until after dark.... It's in these low-revenue situations when your venue way of life is threatened, that you cross your fingers and hope at least a few of your killer shows with killer bands per month get some traffic and drinkers to sustain your existence from being transformed to the latest yuppster dancecrap bar....
Now a lot of this is on both the promoters and the bands in terms of turnouts.... I use the Internet for promotion a lot.... I try to temper my Facebook event posting to a couple of times a week.... Some people appreciate that or if not, they can delete me or erase me from their newsfeed.... The point is, I try not to be annoying by posting my shit into every group that exists on Facebook six times a day.... Anyhow, it would be super helpful if the bands themselves put some social media effort into promoting their shows.... It's few and far between these days to see bands actually taking the old-school initiative and doing handbills and posters.... Every bit of promo helps, especially word of mouth! The venue gives me a limited amount of money to advertise so I have to hit as many relevant free sites that I can....
But really, my existence as a booking coordinator for the venue is a different animal.... I'm filling the 50 or so slots a month with bands that want to play a show or promoters that want to put on a show.... It's quite the juggling act to make sure the bands you have scheduled aren't playing five other shows within the six weeks before or after your date.... It hurts both the bands and the venue when a band is overplayed.... I respect both the revenue a venue needs to operate and the dough a band needs to exist.... somewhere is the middle...
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SCENE!
- wendythirteen
