Promoting live music is a tricky and often thankless task – just ask us here at Tone Deaf who have often suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis) fortune when putting on bands and doing the myriad tasks involved in making a successful event happen. That’s why we’ve been watching with interest the plans of the upcoming BAM Festival in Brisbane planned for October. We haven’t said anything until now, because we didn’t want to comment until the whole festival plans were revealed.
You don’t want to knock someone when they’ve clearly shot themselves in the foot multiple times with a cannon, but this festival looks to be a disaster. From what we can surmise as a result of the festival’s own publicity, research by music sites Mess+Noise and FasterLouder, and a large dose of common sense; what this festival seems to be doing is charging unknown bands a massive sum to strut their wares to what may well be an empty field and a vacuum of goodwill.
Based on a ticket selling plan that resembles an earthquake-stricken pyramid selling scheme, the organisers appear to have blind conviction in their ability to pull off a festival for thousands of people in the toughest festival city market in Australia, without paying bands and charging punters through the nose for everything else. Bearing a scary resemblance to the disastrous Blueprint Festival which left the naive organisers $500,000 in debt in Victoria in September last year, we wish the organisers well, but would like to remind them of the usual method of starting small, building goodwill and reputation up over a number of years and then capitalising once that is established.
Check out Mess+Noise’s sleuthing here
