97-shiki

Out of the blue, we got a message on our MySpace page from “Amy”… “im booking a show in chicago”. OK, so what’s the deal? It turns out, that “Amy” works for BigTime Entertainment, and she “loves our music” and wants us to play on a show she’s putting together…

[UPDATE - June 16th, 2008: This "Amy" is total bullshit, it's really just the BigTime Ent guy Ryan with a fake identity / profile. I got him to reveal his hand in an email. See links at the end]

OK, stuff like this comes in all the time on MySpace, and much of it is total bullshit, but I like to make sure, so I try to sift through it all. I went to BigTime Entertainment’s site, and read their stuff. Go ahead, its weird. And creepy. Although I knew it was a commercial enterprise, it was sprinkled with exuberant rhetoric about how “BigTime Entertainment proudly exists to serve the local music community and refuses to settle for anything less” and “it’s our mission to Connect bands to their Fans” and how they are all about “contributing to local music”. Digging deeper inter their fluff speak and you-can-do-it blurbs, I determined they are just another pay-to-play business model using the “you sell tickets and get get paid accordingly”.

My first thought was just to delete it an move on. But then I stumbled across some really insulting declarations on their site. Namely this one…

In contrast to the “traditional” all-ages concert producer, BigTime does not consider it appropriate to act as a music critic. According to BigTime’s philosophy, everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion because “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Since two people can hear the same song and exhibit exactly opposite reactions to it, our only means for determining the legitimacy of a band’s music is to use fan response as our primary indicator. If people like it, then it’s valuable; there’s no fairer way to critique an art form.

“…THERE’S NO FAIRER WAY TO CRITIQUE AN ART FORM“!?!?! OK, that’s it — as anyone who knows me can attest, I just can’t let that shit go. I thought about all the younger bands or people newer to underground / independent music that just might fall for this crap. And that spurred me to write about it here. And to try to get inside the head of Amy.

Amy, from her MySpace profile picture (if that is was her real picture, or name [which I now strongly suspect she doesn't exist]), is herself pretty young — I’d guess early 20s. And cute! Imagine that? She simply might not know what she was getting involved with, or how some people (like… me!) see what her company is all about. I was giving her the benefit of the doubt (I can be generous with that. But if I’d just decided it was a scam from the start, then I wouldn’t have the fun of ranting about this stuff). I wrote her an email (a pdf), asked her how she’d heard of 97-shiki, and told her that I found the ticket scheme and a lot of the other language on their site to be pretty clueless and offensive. I told her about how I’d been “connecting to my fans” for decades, touring all over the world, without having to compete against other local bands for ticket sales. And really, if BigTime wasn’t promoting the show, or making the music, or doing… anything, what exactly were they doing for the local scene in the first place? I was polite, not insulting.

The reply was “douglas, thanks for getting back to me, we just need a few more details from you, then we will add you to our artist roster and we can see asap what dates you’ll fit best onto”, along with an big hairy “–BigTime Entertainment–CHICAGO Booking Form:”. Hunh? Did she even read my reply? Of course not. I wrote her back, and asked her to reply to my concerns and questions. Nothing. I wrote her back a couple more times. Nothing. Just today, I noticed her MySpace profile is deleted. Haha, well, that says it all, doesn’t it?

Without “her side of the story”, it looks like I called her and BigTime on their shit, and they ran away. Specifically, here’s what sucks ass about them and this whole thing: they refer to local music as a “market”, and they book some eight band show at some place that no one goes to, and get all these bands who aren’t connect to each other in any way to compete against each other for ticket sales, so the band that works the hardest pushing tickets to their friends and fans gets the most money for the gig. All the while BigTime takes their cut. For doing what? The bands make the music, promote the show, sell the tickets, play the show, and give BigTime a cut. I feel sorry for all those bands that fall for this, and think they’re going to “make it”. I feel sorry for bands that think they’re going to make money, and that selling tickets equates artistic value. You’re all deluded, and you don’t get it, and you’re getting exploited and screwed. That’s what D.i.Y. shows, labels, tours, zines, etc etc are all about — not letting some outside entity convince you that you need them communicate your ideas and art with people: you can do that yourself.

So, fuck you. BigTime.

End Notes:

- Another similar bullshit-exploit-bands-scam outfit is Emergenza Music Festival

- Yes I know, I had a half finished line in my email — I was pissed!

- Further, the “reply to my email” trick is an email harvesting scam, so they got me there.

- HA HA HA! someone else calling bull and shit…

- And more bullshit detectors going off!!! This one breaks down their contract/agreement thing, funny! http://www.wig-out.com/&pay-to-play.htm

- Oh, so much, this sums it up well too.

- Get the idea yet?!?!

- A final email (PDF), where “Amy” (really, Ryan of BTE) rants about how his business model kicks ass, and “mine” sucks. Bro.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Scene. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.