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Re: Looping venues in NYC



At 6:47 PM -0500 12/6/02, Sempai wrote:
>What is the Tzadik crowd?  And why would they make it hard for you?

I'd imagine he means that sort of "downtown scene" --
musicians like John Zorn and Elliott Sharp and etc.

It's hard to get booked but you do have to realize
that these musicians have managed to do it by being
consistently good draws and also by playing music
of some musical value.

You have to work at it.  There are a lot of places
to try -- Chama, where I do open loop, is a nice
little space with a not-completely-terrible PA,
but you have to bring your own crowd because it's
far far east on 4th St.  There are all sorts of
floating parties (you should get on my mailing
list http://extremeNY.com/list to find them)
and they are great places to play.

What sort of material are you using to book?
You have to have a CD of your stuff -- they're
20 cents to make these days and people just don't
have cassette players any more.

And a press packet wouldn't hurt either.

It costs a LOT of money to run even a small
club like Tonic.  I'd imagine they'd need
to average $500 gross income every night to
make it worth their while to exist.
(That's a total gross revenues of less than $200,000
a year and that has to cover rent and all salaries,
alcohol and consumables, gear costs, and expenses...)

They need to know that you can bring in
enough people to spend $500 in their space
in other words, just to stay alive.

These people aren't in it for the money --
they'd be doing something else -- but they need
to see that you are doing the right thing
to try to get people in the door yourself.


OK -- having the right friends has never hurt.
But that isn't going to get you more than a few
gigs a year if you don't have a good act and
a good press packet.

    /t
-- 

http://loopNY.com ......................An "open loop": shows every 
Saturday!
http://extremeNY.com/submit .......................... submit to the 
calendar.