While always wanting to encourage new events, bands, gigs and so on here at Tone Deaf, we were always sceptical of the premise for the BAM Festival in Brisbane. Appearing to be run by several naive and arrogant ‘promoters’ lacking the experience to organise a pissup in a brewery, the event has seemed doomed to failure from inception.
Despite a venue 45 minutes from Brissie which actually looks quite inviting, they decided to hold an event with bands no-one had ever heard of, while making bands sell tickets in return for the opportunity to play. After some apparently misleading statements over ticket sale numbers, they’ve now announced that if a certain number of tickets are not sold by today (August 25th) the event will be cancelled.
Ignoring all the lessons from the Blueprint Festival disaster in Victoria last September, the organisers shot themselves in the foot with their amateur publicity and promotion, as well as having their naive plans queried by music website Mess+Noise. While it must have been demoralising for the organisers to have had to cop buckets of shit from smart arses on message boards, the advice dished out was generally sound.
The organisers dreamed of putting on an event that would rival Glastonbury for scale and size, forgetting the chorus of advice throughout the music business ; which was to ‘start small, get a decent headliner or two and build the event up slowly’. It took the Big Day Out 15 years to sell out in Australia’s biggest cities, while even relatively new festivals that now sell out such as Splendour In The Grass and Parklife had modest starts.
Promoting live music has a lot of risks and for every experienced promoter booking a band for a song before they explode worldwide, the business is littered with bankrupt promoters and the corpses of festival cancellations and disasters. It appears that the priest has been called and the last rites will be read for BAM Fest later today.
