OCD - Three letters that spell success for your folk club

Pete Willow reflects on the skills and attitudes behind the effective organisation of folk clubs and offers a useful survival test for your venue.

Never mind the fountain of youth or the meaning of life. The big quest for Folk21 and its affiliates is the secret of a successful folk club.

Often the topic of regional away-days, festival workshops and internet forum discussions, suggestions range from clever marketing and a high quality host act to decent beer and a good car park. But underpinning all of these is a mental attitude – I would go as far as to say a condition – possessed by organisers determined to make their clubs work.

I’m talking about OCD.

Yes - Organisers’ Control and Domination, a phenomenon I have often witnessed during a lifetime of enjoying folk music at small venues. OCD is characterised by acts of planning and management to the last zealous detail.

Giveaway indicators of OCD include admission tables laden with neatly stacked flyers, cleanly printed and laminated notices and attended by efficiently busy admin-receptionists offering membership cards, loyalty cards, raffle tickets and copies of the club newsletter. Chairs in the club room are aligned with utmost precision and instrument cases are stacked neatly in the anteroom.

Please do not read this article as a criticism of OCD. When the world outside is seething in chaos and insanity, it’s reassuring to know that the folk club can be a welcoming sanctuary of orderliness where everything can be relied on to be in its right place.

Yes it may result in a ritualistic format with the same floor singers each week singing the same songs and comperes telling the same jokes. But folk clubs driven by OCD are arguably the ones that survive and even flourish.

Does your folk club display symptoms of management by OCD?

Does it depend on meticulous organisation to offer a safe and predictable experience for its visitors and members? Here’s a simple test to establish – with mathematical exactitude – the position of your club on the scale of systematic supervision. Tot up your score for each answer to find out.

After all, it’s good to know these things.

1. Which of these is the closest to your club’s approach to managing floor singers?

            a) All your floor singers are booked in advance, sometimes weeks ahead of the actual night. If approached by a floor singer you think would not entertain the audience, you lie through your teeth and claim that all the slots are already full. (3 points)

            b) On arrival, each floor singer has to sign up for a 10-minute performance slot on a form that is displayed at the door. It’s first-come, first-served and heaven help any floor singer who isn’t ready at their selected time or whose performance runs over time. (2 points)

           c) You keep your fingers crossed that enough floor singers show up to pad out the evening because your resident act only knows three numbers and your guest is contracted to perform a maximum of two 30-minute sets. (1 point)

2. Which of these is the closest to your club’s approach to time management?

           a) The MC steps on stage at 8pm on the dot, your guest act is given precise start and finish times, your interval runs for exactly 20 minutes and you are so determined to keep to the schedule that you have timer switches pre-set to operate the room lights and interval music, no matter what is happening on the stage. (3 points)

           b) The MC stands and hovers by the side of the stage to intimidate long-winded floor acts to finish their song and get off. You consider resorting to a long stick with a hook to grab acts that over-run (or otherwise cause the audience to lose its will to live). (2 points)

          c) You adopt a laid-back approach, allowing all floor singers who show up a chance to perform, even if it results in the guest act’s final set being reduced to a 10-minute performance to a half-empty room because people have to be up early for work the following morning. (minus 5 points!)

3. Which of these is more typical of your club’s overall operational policy?

     a) You have a detailed written constitution, agreed by a committee, published on the website and summarised in small print on the back of your flyers and business cards, setting out:

                     i.   your rules on booking guests, and organising floor singers;

                     ii.  your club’s mission and vision statements;

                     iii. your definition of ‘folk music’ with prohibitions on the use of electric guitars, 5-string banjos (4-string banjos are permitted), keyboards (unless battery operated), drum kits and mouth-operated bagpipes;

                     iv. your sanctions and penalties against anyone contravening such club regulations as entering the room in the middle of someone’s song, moving the furniture to create more leg-room, refusing to buy a raffle ticket or farting during the unaccompanied performance of a Child ballad. (5-15 points depending on the number of clauses and sub-clauses in the policy document)

            b) Your operational policy is based on rule-of-thumb expediency in which decisions are made on the hoof to deal with emerging situations, ranging from floor singers not bothering to tune their instruments until they are called on stage, to old-school guest acts, who were famous in the 60s, cracking sexist jokes. (2 points)

            c) You have an entirely laissez-faire policy in which allowable ‘folk’ music performances include Gilbert & Sullivan songs, Gilbert O’Sullivan songs, Black Sabbath hits, interminably long-winded, allegorical to the point of incomprehensible, self-penned songs, or past Eurovision entries now so old that they could be regarded as traditional. (nul points)

4. Which of these is the closest to your club’s approach to booking guests?

            a) Every now and again, you pick up the phone, ring round your contacts and see if anyone is available to appear over the next few weeks. (1 point)

            b) You visit folk festivals and other folk clubs and make a list of acts who you think will go down well. (2 points. Increase to 5 points if you decide to keep the list on file and carry on rebooking all the guests you had last year)

            c) You keep diaries for the next three years with every date fully booked in advance apart from the occasional singers night which will probably become another guest night anyway if someone famous happens to have a free date in their national tour schedule and is willing to perform for the jug collection, a chance to crash out on your sofa and a bowl of cornflakes. (3 points. More if the sofa opens up to bed with clean sheets and a perfectly plumped pillow)

And finally

5. Who is actually in charge of your folk club?

            a) You are and your word is law. If you have to have a committee, you insist on the right to veto any decision it may make. You may be a benevolent dictator but you are a dictator nevertheless. (3 points – or more if you are particularly OCD anyway)

            b) A Committee. This is elected periodically, according to the rules set out in your constitution. The Committee includes a Treasurer who manages the club’s own bank account and issues a quarterly report on the size of the club’s overdraft. Club members form a panel of wannabe Simon Cowells who adopt a points system to determine who should be booked as guests and agree rules on booking criteria, e.g. all artists must have proved popular with the audience for at least two floor spots or have been given a glowing review in Folk Roots. (Also 3 points)

            c) The audience. You are a committed democrat, an ageing hippy, an anarchist or a closet Thatcherite – whatever, the free market reigns. (0 – 5 points, depending on how much you secretly admire Margaret Thatcher. 10 points if you actually ask your audience to participate in secret ballots to determine the price of raffle tickets).

So how did you score?

15 points or more: OCD rules and your folk club is your own fiefdom. It stands an excellent chance of surviving for the next three years or when your last regular audience member pops his/her clogs, whichever comes sooner.

10-15 points: you try to stay on top of things. You may have great plans but find yourself having to repress your inner Genghis Khan to make space for your outer Jeremy Corbyn.

0-10 points: you may have moments of lucid assertiveness but more often than not you find yourself sitting at the door of your folk club with no idea of who is going to show up or what is going to happen. Either that or you’re just too nice.

Anything less than zero: there is no trace of OCD at your folk club whatsoever. Its guiding principle is in fact SNAFU.

Speaking as a matchmaker

Jacey Bedford's Guide to Working with Agents for Folk Clubs, Small Venue Organisers and Independent Bookers.

Originally posted on Jacey's Folk Agent blog, reproduced here with kind permission.
by Jacey Bedford

Every so often one of my artists calls me to tell me they’ve been approached by a venue or folk club organiser to do a gig, and that person has stated categorically that they don’t work through agents. Ever. Full stop. End of subject.

Except, probably eight or nine times out of ten I know that the organiser does work through agents because I know the organiser and they’ve worked through me before.

So why the posturing?

• Some club organisers think they’re doing the artist a favour by ‘saving’ the artist from paying the agent’s commission.
• Some simply like to play the old pals act. It makes them feel special.
• Others think they’ll get a better price by cutting out the agent.

In almost all cases, what the organiser has done is put the artist into an awkward or embarrassing situation by forcing them to discuss business. One of the reasons artists employ agents is because it allows them to concentrate on their music and take care of the social side of being a performer without having to mention money or haggle over fees. It allows them to be a musician, not a sales person, and it shelters them from the reality of being a business as well as an artiste. An agent buffers the performer from the harsh realities of business and saves them from trying to do paperwork between rehearsals and travelling to the next gig.

Ideally…
In an ideal world an agent should be a matchmaker, putting the right artist into the right venue at the right price, so for venue, artist and agent it’s a win-win-win situation. If a venue organiser builds up a good relationship with an agent they’ll fall over themselves to make life easy.

Why Artists use Agents
Many artists, especially full-timers, use a booking agent because they are too busy to deal with arranging their own gigs. If they are constantly on the road, playing music up and down the country and abroad, they don’t have time to sit behind a desk making and taking phone calls, following up on potential gigs, arranging tour schedules for nine to eighteen months in advance, sending out contracts, packing up posters and hauling them to the post office, and making sure venues have all the promo they need. They’d rather pay someone else to do it, so they know it gets done efficiently whether they are at home or abroad.

A few artists simply don’t like doing the job; they’re bad at paperwork and they hate dealing with money, and even more dislike negotiating fees. They’d rather curl up and die than pick up the phone and call someone they don’t know to ask for a gig. They hate coping with the responses such as ‘never heard of you’ or ‘our audience doesn’t like [insert music genre here]’. Frankly, they are tender, shy souls and prefer to avoid getting their confidence knocked five times a night.

Besides, the other advantage of using an agent is that they already have a database of potential gigs which an artist taps into. An agent’s database is her living, built up painstakingly over time.

Why You Should Respect an Artist’s Decision to use an Agent

So if you’re an organiser/booking person why should you go through an agent when the artist has stayed with you after your club gig? You bought him/her a pint at the last festival you went to. You have his/her phone number, and feel you know him/her well enough to call direct, don’t you?

An artist who has an agent most probably has an agreement to ONLY work through that agent and to pass on all gig enquiries to the agency. If they arrange gigs on their own behalf it’s going to muddy the waters between an artist and an agent, breaking trust, and possibly lead to the agent dropping the artist from the agency roster if the diary gets too complicated to maintain.

If the artist accepts a gig privately, but still wants to square it with his agent to keep relations sweet, he’ll probably just inform his agent, get her to send the contract and pay her the standard commission anyway. So you’re causing the artist to do half the work and still pay the full commission.

You may also be causing the artist some embarrassment if s/he’s one of the ones who hates discussing money and haggling over fees. The price is usually the price, but if you end up bartering the artist down you can leave him/her feeling all kinds of resentful.

So please, if an artist works through an agent, please respect that. Book the artist through the agent. By all means drop the artist an email or call them up for a chat if you know them well enough. Tell them you’re looking forward to the gig, but don’t ask them to negotiate terms or discuss fees. Keep friendship and business separate.

Jacey Bedford is a writer of science fiction and fantasy (www.jaceybedford.co.uk), the secretary of Milford SF Writers (www.milfordSF.co.uk), a singer (www.artisan-harmony.com) and a music agent booking UK tours and concerts for folk performers (www.jacey-bedford.com). She's also a Home Office / Border Agency licensed sponsor processing UK work permits (Certificate of Sponsorship).

Looking for more sure-fire marketing advice for your folk club?

Perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this!

Archive post 

Pete Willow reflects on his experience as a folk event organiser, newspaper columnist and PR lecturer to ask if the marketing mindset is really appropriate when promoting your folk club. 

First published in the original Folk21 blog, September 2014.

Publicity and promotion are frequently on the agenda. Whenever folk club organisers gather to discuss – well – what it’s like to be a folk club organiser, one concern often shared is the need to get bigger (and younger) audiences. One solution often considered is ‘we need better marketing’.

Jacey Bedford provided some excellent advice in this blog about the responsibilities of the artist (or his/her publicist) and the venue when promoting or selling folk events. But the perennial problem remains, at least in the minds of some, that the promotion of folk clubs is largely preaching to the converted. 

Even in these enlightened times of folk awards, folk degrees and major international folk festivals, the folk club circuit itself continues to struggle to make itself heard on our airways or seen in our national and regional press.  Most folk clubs, including those who book guests regularly, remain trapped in the twilight zone of popular culture, largely ignored or marginalised by the mainstream media.

It’s tempting to see this as a PR problem. Improve the image of folk club and you’ll increase your grass roots audiences. Perhaps even change its name by invoking the ‘cooler’ nomenclature of ‘acoustic’ or ‘indie’.

The problem is that we live in an age where the market reigns supreme. Music has become a commodity. Musicians are presented as celebrities. And we are the consumers. We have become immersed in the dominant discourse of supply and demand where we are encouraged to expect high-quality, glossy, professional performances. We fork out for the admission and we want value for money.

Now if you’re reading this blog, you’ll know that thousands of acts touring the folk club circuit do give much more than that. But, let’s be honest, how often is a splendidly entertaining guest supported by a parade of floor singers demonstrating questionable levels of musicianship or ability to connect with the audience? And as folk club cognoscenti, how often do we tolerate and indulge the well-meaning amateurs who show up every week and keep the club viable?

If you are an organiser desperate to enhance the appeal of your venue to a wider, ‘non-folk’ audience, there are ways and means. One common tactic is to plan your floor singers in advance as well as your guests to ensure that the evening is packed with competent performers with mass appeal. Of course this may upset a few of your regulars and many folk club organisers just don’t have the heart to tell their most loyal supporters that - in this hard-nosed world of market forces – they are more of a liability than an asset.

Others (and, I would suggest, the more enlightened) adopt a more determined view that folk clubs are not, and never will be, The X-Factor. The whole point of the local, back-room folk club is the opportunity it offers for people to share songs and tunes that they have discovered and learned, sometimes popular, sometimes obscure, sometimes performed with panache, sometimes with bum notes and forgotten lyrics. This is arguably more in keeping with the essence of folk as an authentic community experience, unpolluted by the market-driven priorities of the popular music biz.

But if the true spirit of the folk club means rejecting the mainstream music-as-commodity values, it raises the question – do we really need to use conventional advertising and promotional tactics? The marketing and media relations text books may well provide tips and advice on how to let the world know your folk club exists but this can be quite a lot of effort for very little return, like seeds landing on stony ground.

Take the press release for example. Here I speak as a part-time music columnist and PR lecturer who often has a lot to say on how to produce a news release that will get results. I have joined in with the mantra of many on how to – and how not to – appeal to news editors, by providing a strong angle, good photograph and well-written copy that can be processed quickly before the deadline.

This might make the journalist happy, but the truth is that the newspaper I write for isn’t interested in filling your folk club with people. It is interested in selling newspapers. It wants its entertainment stories to be – well – entertaining to the mass audience. Yes I’ve received messages from club organisers, grateful for the coverage I’ve given to their recent guest night because a couple of people told them that they saw it in the paper. 

A couple of people!?  After the club went to the trouble of producing a press release, I went to the trouble of turning it into an article and my sub-editor went to the trouble of presenting it on the page that was read by anything from 30,000 to 50,000 people? From the organisers’ perspective, press releases seem a very inefficient way of filling the room with happy punters.

If you’ve read this far in the hope of learning more tricks of the marketing trade, do not despair. This post may not be about killer tactics to put bums on seats but I am hoping that you’ll pick up one important message. 

When promoting your folk club, be true to yourself. 

Posters and press releases with images of sexy young starlets brandishing acoustic guitars, or looking mournful while standing in a river (yes I did actually receive such a photograph in a recent press release) may appeal to the Simon Cowell sentiments but they are not about folk music.

The best way to ‘market’ your club is to make it a happy experience. Make people feel welcome. Intersperse your big name events with singers’ nights to allow your regulars a bit of limelight, but invite some of the more talented acts on the local circuit to host or take part. Have fun raffle prizes. Talk to audience members and find out what they want. Yes, yes, yes, you know all this but why do we still hear so many tales of badly-run, cliquey clubs that make newcomers feel they are sitting in on a high-denominational church service?

So, for a change, I’m not offering advice. Just something to think about. It’s not the big names that will boost your audiences. It’s your reputation and your creativity. 

Marketing from text books alone will not turn your folk club into a field of dreams. You have to build it and people will come.

Are folk clubs becoming jug addicts?

Pete Willow looks at the use of jug collections in the financial management of folk clubs. Are they a threat to the livelihood of professional guest artists of a boost for grass roots music-making culture?

It could be a jug, a mug, a hat or a chamber pot – it doesn’t matter which receptacle is used, the jug collection is increasingly intrinsic to folk club economics. Many organisers are forsaking the admission charge by passing around the begging bowl and folk club guests are starting to get used to it.

The phenomenon follows the basic exchange system that has kept buskers and churches going for years. Audiences are admitted free but are asked to contribute cash to cover the fee of the guest act. There’s no fixed price and no raffle prize. This brings a new dimension to the art of the MC – persuading people to fork out as much as possible.

There are numerous tactics. Glassware or a clear plastic pitcher can be circulated very publicly so that everyone can see how much you’re putting in. There’s no getting away with loose change, not even pound coins when others are visibly allowing their fivers and tenners to flutter into the pot. And we all know that coins are far too noisy anyway – paper money is far less anti-social.

There are no exemptions for floor singers. They are encouraged to chip in along with everyone else. After all, they are also gaining the benefit of the guest’s performance and they might be guests themselves one day, with any luck. You don’t even have to be in the club room – punters in the bar next door are also prevailed on to support the folk club that’s bringing much needed income to the local boozer.

Jug collections can be quite effective. My own club, Willow & Tool’s Music Parlour, takes place in a very small room but still often manages to muster up eighty or ninety pounds on a night, sometimes over a hundred (note to future guests – that is not a guarantee!). Admittedly this is nowhere near the desired performance fee of many artists on the folk club circuit but it is more than many small admissions-charging clubs make at the door and does not put the venue at risk of closing in debt.

Of course, it is up to the artist on whether they would accept a booking on such terms. For those who depend on paid gigs for a living, it is not ideal or indeed desirable to gamble on the size and generosity of audiences. If all folk clubs adopted this approach, it would hit the pocket of many full-time professional guests; in order to pay the bills they would need to rely more on merchandising, royalties and bookings at other types of venue, from arts centres to festivals.

There need to be other factors to encourage a guest act accept the jug arrangement – it’s a fun place to play, a great audience, well-crafted beer, the host is a good mate, the venue is en route to another bigger show being played the following night, or the club needs supporting as part of the grass roots culture that keeps live music alive in informal and intimate surroundings. And of course it’s an opportunity to sell CDs.

Aspiring, up-and-coming talent may well see jug-collection bookings as an effective means of building up exposure but it’s surprising how many established and top-calibre artists also agree to appear for whatever the club can afford.

Jug collections do not rest easily with the music-as-commodity approach that guest-booking venues have traditionally adopted whereby folk clubs pay set fees, often specified in printed contracts, and are thus run as (frequently loss-making) businesses. It shifts the focus away from what you get as a return on your investment to the more community-orientated ethos of people paying what they feel they can afford. It departs from the conventional marketing model of the music industry while, ironically, adopting a ‘free market’ approach that effectively puts more power in the hands of the consumers.

Except we don’t call audiences ‘consumers’ – just people who love live music and are happy to pitch in financially to keep it going.

It's your shout!

It's time to get the blog rolling again!

A warm welcome to 'Views From The Floor' - the official blog for Folk 21 and the place to discuss and reflect on issues and ideas affecting the world of guest-booking folk clubs and small venues.

This is the new platform for writers on all matters folk, whether you're an organiser, artist, audience member, venue owner, music journalist or someone who works behind the bar!

Things went a little quiet on the blog front some time before we relaunched our website. But our Facebook page Folk 21 Forum continues to buzz with posts, comments and responses and the time seems right to reopen the space for longer or more detailed articles on matters of interest and/or debate. 

Contributions are most welcome. Email your article, with images if you have them and we will do the rest.

We are currently trying to dig out contributions to our previous blog from the archives and will be posting some of these in due course.

Hope you enjoy and find this useful and interesting!

Pete Willow 

Folk 21