Once again, I’ve become a bit slow at updating this blog. But there have been reasons! Not having anywhere to live and no job certainly takes your time away!
But, I’ve also been working pretty hard at getting the band’s online presence sorted out. So after a lot of jangling trying to figure out whether to use WordPress, Moonfruit, or go static, we opted to go for a WordPress.org site using LCN for the domain name and hosting. It’s actually not that bad price-wise. Buying the domain name and hosting cost us around £67 for one year. Not much point paying for a long time because you don’t really know how long your band is going to be around, but let’s hope for all our sakes it does stick around for some time! You can find the website here. Not all pages have content yet but you can treat yourself to a news entry, band biogrpahy and photo gallery. More content is coming so keep checking back.
You can also now find us on Twitter and somewhere in the ether of Facebook there is also a fan page. Although, I have to admit that I’m not really sure how useful the fan page is on Facebook. So far I’ve not found it particularly useful but we’ll see how it goes. We also have a YouTube channel – phew, I’m pretty tired just thinking about all the social media stuff that needs to be implemented into the average musician’s life these days.
We have our first gig coming up on the 26th August at Henry’s Cellar Bar in Edinburgh courtesy of the Bainbridge Music Showcase. I must stress though that all bands looking for gigs need to be aware of promoters still expecting you to pay to play. Matt Stevens puts it pretty well here so I don’t really need to go into it again but all I can say is that I did turn down a gig on my band’s behalf because they were expecting us to cough up £100 to play with other local bands. If we were really lucky we’d get £50 back if we sold all the tickets so we’d still be £50 out of pocket. When I stressed with this promoter that I didn’t agree with pay to play as I thought it was taking advantage of musicians, he told me he was a musician himself and pay to play was standard. They’ll honestly tell you anything to get your money so please, when gig hunting, don’t fall for this. The more musicians that agree to it, the more promoters will get away with it. The nature of being a promoter is that it’s their responsibility to organise and promote the gig. If they are doing it purely to make money out of the bands then they are in the wrong industry. But don’t fear, there are good guys out there so when you find them just make sure you stick with them and recommend them to your musician pals.
I’ve got some equipment stuff coming up that I need to post so expect that up soon and links to some other stuff I’ve been up to so stay tuned for that.
