Summary of the EBC Open Meeting 13/02/2014
- Key reason for Edinburgh Blues club – to ensue a continuation of paid entry blues gigs for touring acts.
- Blues club on a not for profit basis – constitution available
- Some recent shows had good attendances, indicates market is there.
- Timing, proximity of shows and perceived lack of variety reduced attendance
- No one individual should be responsible for risk or artist choice
- Want to reach to occasional blues music attendees consistently, look to widen appeal
- Bookings for acts who previously did well, and aim to include wide styles of blues
- Want hardcore attendees to come, bring family, friends with them
- Run as group to minimise risk, no rich benefactor. Cannot book lots of gigs without assurances
- One booking per month, concentrate at promoting gig at a time
- We want to carefully manage booking schedule as geography is a challenge
- 20+ festivals with blues acts in Scotland – look to be an option for second shows by acts
- Contact started with blues clubs in N England and other Scottish promoters
- Headliners will also be from Scotland and North of England – travel less of a factor.
- Looking to book local bands as support, provide good venue, exposure, attentive audiences
- To consider range of styles, age ranges for greater following.
- Have limited experience, keen to engage with people who can assist.
- Looking for sustainable club, blue print long standing English blues clubs
- No big or risky bookings. Depends on membership and regular ticket sales. Membership benefits – cheaper than tickets, advance notice, newsletter
- Profile – use recognised venue (initially the Voodoo Rooms)
- Full use of gig listings, ticket retailers, flyers, posters
- Key tool subscription membership
- Our proposal is to offer a £10 monthly fee. With this we will look to put on 10 shows a year.
- As a rough guide a show will cost around £1,000 in total to put on.
- Looking for 100 signed up members, plus general admission ticket sales.
- Looking for some help in particular areas:
- Legal/accounting – should the club be a limited liability company or a charity
- Practical help in designing and printing flyers, posters etc
- Sponsorship – we’d love to hear from potential sponsors
- Donations to raffle
- Known names from outside music as patrons of the club.
- We have booked the Voodoo Rooms for our first live music event on Friday 7 March
- we would like to have a showcase featuring 3 or 4 acts.
- This will showcase some of the great local acts who will be strongly considered for future support roles.
- As well as a live music event, this will continue our push to develop the EBC membership. The event will be free to all become members before that date.
- There will be an entry fee for non-members, but this can be offset by becoming members at the show.
- We are looking to finalise a line up in the coming week or so.
- If you’d like to offer your services to play at this event, please let us know.
- The sooner we have a viable membership, the sooner we can speak to other acts and start working on developing a full programme
12 Comments
Doug Ring · January 18, 2014 at 2:27 pm
£10 a month? Really? £120 a year? Seems a bit steep.
Would you be offering an annual subscription discounted from 12 times £10? Because collecting monthly means punters setting up direct debits or some such.
And then, am I still paying on the door for gigs? If so, and especially since I can’t necessarily get to every gig, I wouldn’t consider that good value for money, sorry.
Nick · January 18, 2014 at 4:02 pm
Doug, The 10pounds per month entitles a members to have free entry into a gig. A Member would not pay twice.
Nick
Doug Ring · January 18, 2014 at 4:18 pm
Okay, thanks Nick – that’s a much better deal then!
Maybe you could still offer a reduction for an annual membership up front – say 12 months for 10, a one-off payment of £100? That would net you more cash to get the club started, and remove the need for members to set up direct debits.
Cheers, Doug.
Nick · January 18, 2014 at 4:46 pm
Direct debits are one option that we will look into. We have an alternative to use PayPal recurring payments also. We are attempting to keep all those processes simple to manage as we have much work still to do.
Annie · January 18, 2014 at 5:57 pm
Hi Nick questions relating to the above – can prospective members have an option re monthly payment or direct debit? Would that make the bookkeeping harder, or would it benefit the regular income i.e. you’d have sums coming in monthly as well as yearly lump sums? This would cover monthly running costs as well as providing larger amounts on a yearly basis.
I was going to ask about concessionary rates for disabled people but free entry is a pretty good concession! 🙂
Annie
Nick · January 18, 2014 at 6:32 pm
Hi Annie. If payments were via direct debit, either monthly or yearly, could be managed. Last thing I want to get into, is chasing people up for late payment. PayPal offers the ability to take recurring payments also but we only get 9.46 from a 10 pound payment. I think on 120 pounds, PayPal would take around 6 pounds. At this moment in time I don’t know Direct Debit transaction charges.
Two Stix · January 22, 2014 at 10:54 am
Nick, I ran a night last year which involved 200 people from all over the country to buy tickets to attend. Ultimately all the profits went to charity, and I was trying to ensure as much of the money as possible went to the charity. I used paypal to achieve this. Yes, paypal does take a cut of any transfer UNLESS it is transferred as a friend transfer for monies owed, then it is a FREE transaction. Yes, I tried to explain this as much as possible, and I would say 90-95% of the people understood, but you do still get some who get it wrong.
Direct bank transfer is best option, but paypal is very easy to use, and very safe for everyone as well.
Good luck with everything
Paul_BluesInBritain · January 19, 2014 at 8:34 pm
Hi Nick
Blues In Britain would like to offer a six month subscription to the magazine as a raffle prize at your first gig on 7th March. We’ll be at the gig as we’re in town that weekend.
On the Direct Debit front, you need to be a large and registered organisation to be able to use DDs. You’ll find you’ll have to use Standing Orders (not quite so good) but a straight transfer into a new bank account should be free.
Nick · January 20, 2014 at 1:01 am
Wow.Thank you for that great offer fo 6 months subscription for “Blues in Britain”. Very much appreciated. Thank you and looking forward to seeing you at our fundraiser.
Agreeing with you on DD. Standing Order or PayPal recurring payments seems a much better option. Thanks for your pointers on that one.
Andy · January 20, 2014 at 2:31 pm
Hi,
I have a couple of suggestions, as far as where to consider particular services, as requested above.
1) If you don’t have a designer, contact Events Armoury, who offer a competent and reasonable design service.They are also the go to company for flier print (boxes of 5000, which would ideally have multiple dates, or be backed with club promo), and other print. There are other places, depending upon what you need.
2) If you intend to incorporate a company you can buy them off the shelf and have them customised by companies such as Scotts Company Formations at down Bonnington way. It’s much cheaper than buying one through a solicitor. I’m not sure where to get advice on charity vs, Ltd co, but this page seems to discuss it, and I’m not sure on what grounds you could qualify as a charity.
http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/anyanswers/charity-vs-limited-company
It may be that you can register as a club, or other body though. I had a quick look at the HRMC VAT pages, and it seems that if I have read correctly the current level of turnover is £79,000 per annum, which wouldn’t be an issue in teh most immediate future. This page details that http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/start/register/when-to-register.htm
Maybe speaking to the PRS might be worthwhile. It is possible to get funding for certain projects (from other bodies too) again, this would down the line, but definitely worth considering. PRS may be able to offer legal advice though….
oldbones · February 2, 2014 at 6:03 pm
We at Our City Radio would offer our free services to help in promoting your events. We currently have 3 x Networks in Scotland and will shortly begin broadcasting locally to each of our areas in Edinburgh,Glasgow and Aberdeen. Not only will we give you free broadcasting of events but we will also post events up on our local area network websites and will share to our social network contacts.
Best Regards
Dave Amos
Regional manager for Our City Radio in Scotland
Nick · February 2, 2014 at 7:24 pm
Thank you very Much Dave:-) that will certainly help . Thank you 🙂
Comments are closed.