Re: Attitude

[paul <phaslem@wightman.ca>]

I also echo that this has been an interesting discussion



>      And the next time anyone tells me how much 
> great publicity I will get for playing their gig
>for free… I’m going to charge them $10 just for 
>saying that.  And if they insist that it’s true,
>I’ll charge them another $10.  Then say that 
>it’s probably the most money I’ll ever make from
>doing a free gig for them.  :)



I can totally sympathize with your feelings about 
hearing that phrase "do my free gig and you'll 
get great publicity"  Pretty much the only thing 
I've ever gotten from doing free gigs is invitations to do more free gigs.
So now I tell them that at this point in my 
musical career, I have recorded 8 albums, played 
on maybe 20 other recordings, toured all over 
north america, had other people record music I've 
written... I really don't feel like I need the 
little bit of publicity that their event will 
generate, what I need is to start getting paid 
consistently for my work; and that they would be 
way further ahead just asking me if I will 
support their cause. Then I explain that I would 
normally charge about $500.00 to do a concert 
like this. So if they'd like me to perform at 
their benefit for whatever, I'll charge them 
$500.00 and for every 50 people that come out 
I'll donate back $100.00, so if they work hard 
and get 250 people out to the concert they get my 
fee back as a donation and I get a tax receipt 
for donating that fee which is essentially what 
they're asking me to do anyway. These are just 
hypothetical numbers and I usually scale it to be 
realistic depending on the expected size of the 
event etc. By doing this I've been asked to play 
at a lot fewer free events but the ones that I do 
play at have been quite successful for all of us.
I've also found that this policy makes people 
take my work more seriously because it has value. 
Earlier in my career I used to almost 
apologetically as for $100.00 to perform and all 
too often heard back from the organizer that I 
was a lot better than they were expecting because 
I was so cheap. It is an unfortunate reality that 
there is an underlying belief that we generally 
"get what you pay for" thus free equals pretty ho 
hum. Wasn't on this list that someone posted a 
story last year in the Washington Post about the 
concert violinist that was asked to busk at a 
busy Subway stop? Seems that only a couple of 
people stopped to listen at all to the guy who 
normally was receiving standing ovations in 
concert halls around the world; the 
difference.... as the song says "he was playing real good for free"

my two cents


Paul Haslem
www.dulcify.ca