Reports are flying today through the twitosphere & the blogosphere about some less than community minded behaviour on the part of the Surface Unsigned Festival of rock bands taking place in Birmingham at the Rainbow & the Medicine Bar.
This is basically a ‘battle of the bands’ competition, but it turns out that each band on any given night (of six bands) has to sell at least 25 tickets at £6 in order to go through to the next round of the competition – so effectively the band has to cover £150 for each night they play a 20 minute set in; given many nights of the event there have reportedly barely been 25 people in the venue, let alone 150 people, it’s not hard to work out what might be going on – the bands have been having to stump up that cash themselves.
Now operating a pay-to-play is bad enough, but at least the bands have chosen those terms & conditions of their own free will – stoopid as they might be for doing so. But in what can only be described as a PR own goal, the operators of the Surface Unsigned Festival have sent a legal cease-&-desist take-down notice to the main blog for the creative industries in birmingham, Created in Birmingham, for criticising this practice, claiming copyright violation for reprinting the paragraph from the terms & conditions the bands had to sign containing the evidence of the policy.
Do we want this kind of behaviour from music promoters in Birmingham ?
From the rest of the blogosphere:
& much, much more.