Consider all the ambiguities of the title to be deliberate …

There’s a new economic game in Tin Pan Town. We’ve all come across ‘no fee but you can promote yourselves’, ‘chance to play to a great crowd’, ‘you get to keep the take from tickets you sell’ (with or without the sting in the tail ‘once you pass such and such a deposit threshold’), the oldies ‘exposure’ and experience’, the often genuine but about as often hypocritical (depending on whether other staff are volunteers or getting a wage) ‘it’s a charity event’ and the fair enough ‘we hope to play paying gigs soon but there’s no money yet’ (fair enough as I say, provided you’re upfront about it, which varies).

Here’s the new one: ‘We’re a new venue, so although we hope to pay musicians soon we can’t yet.’ I’ve seen it several times in the last few weeks. Now, let’s look at this. If you do play now, unpaid, and wait for there to be fees, there’s no particular motivation for the venue to hire you back. When they have a music budget, they might choose to get acts sufficiently good or sufficiently popular that they never have to play for free, because on average those acts will be likely to bring in more of a fanbase and so more return than acts which can’t (or don’t) insist on being paid every time. But, maybe it’s genuine, or maybe you buy into the argument that musicians need to help out rising venues so that there can be good venues in the future and the whole sector doesn’t collapse, leaving us all back stacking shelves.

But there’s more to it than this. If you genuinely hope to pay for musicians in the future, you acknowledge that live music gets more people through the doors and raises your bar / kitchen takings. At a more basic level, you acknowledge that if you own a place and people play there in a performance-not-open-mic type way, then the musicians are providing the venue with a service. That’s important because a surprising number of advertisers try to present it as the other way round – the venue is providing a service by letting the musicians play!

But, if you should pay for live music, why aren’t you now? ‘We’ve just started up, we can’t afford it yet.’ Now I appreciate times are really quite hard for the pub / bar / venue / entertainment / hospitality sector. Supermarket booze, cable telly, broadband and undernourished wallets make it difficult to coax people out, let alone to get them to spend much when they are out. But, times aren’t exactly easy for music either. It’s around more than ever before, but no one’s willing to pay for it, at any stage of the chain.

Let’s look at what might happen if you tried the ‘we’ll pay when the business is secure’ approach in other sectors. So, waiting staff: can’t afford to pay you right now, but you can keep all your tips and when the place takes off we’ll pay wages. This used to happen – George Orwell describes this sort of setup in Paris between the wars. But it’s, erm, illegal under employment law now, and I haven’t heard of anyone getting away with it for generations. Alcohol supplier: you give credit don’t you? We’ll take the beer and vodka now, and pay up in a couple of months when we’ve sold some so we can pay you. Er, no, says supplier, we only provide credit accounts to clients who’ve bought from us repeatedly and whose creditworthiness we trust – that would not be new businesses without secure financial foundation. First you pay, then you get booze, then maybe later we let you have the booze before you pay.

The last example points in a useful direction though. You may not be able to get credit from a supplier when you’ve just opened up, but everyone knows you have to spend money to make money. When you start up, you take out business loans and raise capital for whatever renovations are needed to open, and to buy initial stocks of consumables, and to pay wages for the first little while. In other words, you pay for the first period of operation with debt, and count on making enough profit to, over a period of time, not only cover costs but also service, reduce and ultimately clear the debt. That, more or less, is how any business startup or expansion works.

Which means, sorry folks, but if you expect me to play, to provide a service, then I expect to be paid. And if you have no money then you should have taken out a bigger loan. No money, no music. The most I might budge to, in the era of crowdfunding, is I might accept deferred payment (unlike the drinks manufacturers, who are in a better economic position than most musicians right now): if you’ll pay acts when you’re more established, then I’m loaning you the cost of my performance. I’ll play, you don’t pay right now, but you do sign a contract establishing debt to me of a set amount, interest payable, etc. etc., and if you fail to conform to the terms (which will probably include a set date to pay the balance unless you’re continuing to pay off all the interest), then so help me Mammon I will chase you through whatever courts and get you to file for bankruptcy if that’s what it takes to get my money.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what the venues that say ‘We can’t pay yet as we are a new venue, but we hope to pay musicians in the future’ are thinking of.