Ah, the perennial discussion: “Should local bands get paid from the door, or a guarantee?”

I’ve touched on this subject before, but I’ve never gotten into this aspect directly. I believe I can give you a definitive answer:

Any band, at any level, can get paid a guarantee – but only if they can guarantee something that’s “business-valuable” to the person writing the checks.

Business-value is different from other values. It’s revenue and profit, pure and simple. There are bands out there that argue in favor of a guarantee everywhere, due to their hours of practice and expensive equipment. I must be blunt. None of that represents any business-value to a venue. Zilch. Zippo. Nothing. You know what does?

People paying money for whatever the venue sells. Some venues sell admission. Others sell things that people can consume. Others sell both.

If booking you appears to be a direct cause of the venue making money, you will also make money. If booking you several times begins to present a statistical pattern, a pattern where bringing you on results in an average amount of revenue and profit for the venue, a guarantee becomes far more possible. Until that pattern becomes established, you aren’t “guarantee” material for that particular establishment.

Of course, some places pay everybody a guarantee. This is a great thing, and it comes from that room having enough overall income to support it. If I were to ever run my own place again, I would hope to be able to do that. However, if it didn’t end up being possible, I wouldn’t be sitting there beating myself up over it. There are plenty of great places that do, in fact, care about music and musicians, but are not economically able to pay a guarantee to everybody. I spent a few years running one such place, and then several more years working for another such outfit.

The music business does not run on some exotic model of risk and reward. It’s just like everything else. If paying every band a set amount (or even just a set “base”) is of manageable risk and significant reward, it will happen. If not, it won’t. If you must have a certain amount to pack in your gear and play, I can respect that, and I would encourage you to find and tailor your show to the places that will pay up, “rain or shine.”

I would also ask you to recognize that proportional payouts are not automatically a sign of greed or other moral failing by a venue operator. If you haven’t looked at the whole picture, please look again.