PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Performing for Nothing, your views?

Somehow I often see comparisons to BiaB and backing tracks as putting musicians out of work.

I play in a duo with backing tracks. The places I play would never hire and have never hired a 4 or more piece band. In most cases the "stage" isn't big enough.

Put the duo in a club where a 4-7 piece band normally plays and it doesn't work. Both the sound and the visual impact is lost in a big room.

So backing tracks can make a duo sound better, but they aren't putting anyone out of work.

We worked the cruise ships for 3 years. We played in the small lounge where duos have always played. The 7 piece band played in the bigger lounge, the orchestra played in the biggest room, and the single played in the piano bar.

We play in a couple of yacht and country clubs. They have always used duos for the regular dinner/dance nights, and when it comes to the Commodore's Ball, or the Change of Watch party, we never get the gig, they hire 5 or more pieces.

We play every Tuesday at a marina with a deck that perhaps fits 50 people - tops. Since it's outdoors, the overflow people bring lawn chairs or sit at picnic tables in the sun. If a 4 piece band with drums were to set up on the deck, they would lose the seating for a dozen or more people.

We played in a hotel that had a big room downstairs and a small room upstairs. The big room held over 100 people and they hired 4 or 5 piece bands. We played upstairs in the small room where we huddled in a corner and they put down one of those 10X10 feet portable dance floors. People had dinner and danced after dinner, but it wasn't the singles bar downstairs by any stretch of the imagination.

In the 1970s I played in a duo with a keyboard player and a drum machine. We competed with the 2 guitar and a drum machine duos. We never competed with a 4 piece band and still do not.

The duos today sound fuller than the old-fashioned 2 musicians and a drum machine duo, but they do not put anyone out of work.

Playing for free does put people out of work. If the freebie person wasn't there, there would be no entertainment and the club would have to hire someone to keep the audience entertained.

Hige difference.

So for all of you people who play for free, think about how you would feel if your boss gave you a day off each week without pay because someone, perhaps less talented than you, would do your job for free.

And then think about whether you want to do that to a fellow musician or not.

There are plenty of non-commercial places you can play for free. When I was young we used to set up in public parks, someone's living room (we even invited friends who would bring food and drink), volunteer for a worthy charity, busk in a public place, and so on. But please don't take the food out of another musician's mouth. It's getting more and more difficult to make a living playing music, please don't make it worse.

We do charities, and we play yearly at the Veteran's Administration hospital. It's a 60 mile drive from our house, the parking is terrible, schlepping the gear is a pain, but when we are done, the warm reception and the friendly chats with the wheelchair bound former soldiers make it all worth while.

That's much better than playing for free while the club owner, bartender, wait staff, dishwasher, janitor, bookkeeper, host/hostess, and everybody else is making money from your talents.

Playing for free is pirating gigs from small time musicians - and that's worse than pirating a rich musician's CD.