We have discussed how clients can use negotiation tricks to put you at a disadvantage, and how you need to prepare yourself with rates and prices, but we also need to discuss how your fellow musician can undermine the market.
There is a class of individuals in our industry who are neither clients nor colleagues. Rather than competing fairly in the marketplace through quality or value, they seek to get work through unfair and unethical methods. They will stop at nothing to achieve dominance and power. You may even know them. They might live in your neighborhood. You may be standing next to one right now.
Scary, right?
The Gig Blockers…
These menacing figures use tactics we would never deem acceptable, and have the potential to ruin the market for all of us. Here are some profiles:
- Mediocre but desperate musicians with such low self-esteem that they charge laughably low prices for what they do, devaluing everyone else.
- Machiavellian maneuverers who enjoy dominating a market by virtually destroying it.
- Insecure performers so afraid to set boundaries that we all have to deal with the ridiculous concessions they make.
- Massive egos that need the spotlight even if it means ruining the gig for everyone else.
- Apathetic trust-funders who will snake gigs just to feel like professionals.
- Shockingly dishonest gossips who will talk down their honest fellow professional to win a gig.
The Gig Blockers have a number of tactics, and though we can’t stop them, we may be able to slow them down if we know what they are up to. Names have been changed to protect the innocent… Never mind, we all know who these are.
- Underbidding: This is the classic gig-stealing approach. I have had others actually deliberately find out what we were making and offer to do the same gig for less. The client will often fall for this, since they don’t know much about music, plus some underbidders are pretty good musicians. The rates seldom recover from this. I can’t even begin to list the myriad gigs that started out as fantastic, with the client happy, prices good, only to be ruined.
- Slander: Worse yet, Gig Blockers will put down their fellow musician, scaring the client, just to get in. This is most prevalent with freelance players competing for gigs with leaders. It only takes a whisper of “unreliable” or “hard to work with” to tip the scales.
- “Sure we’ll play 2 continuous extra hours without overtime” or “We’re happy to eat week-old bandwiches next to the dumpster in the rain” or “A 12-foot trailer is a fine band-house” are ways that some musicians will surrender their dignity to secure a job. Setting any sort of boundaries might jeopardize the gig. An example of such a deal: I once spent a sleepless night in a 90-degree, upstairs, non-air-conditioned rooming house bedroom in Bermuda in July with 4 other guys, The agent? in the resort across the island. Somebody was afraid to say “no.”
- Pretending to join a church in order to get somebody else’s gig using feigned piety. Seems kind of low.
- Resumé Padding: Putting a bunch of fake credits on a client list or credit list. Bluffing about skills or experience. The honest person won’t do this, and thus appears to have a less impressive background. These days the “swag” factor is so full of lies that clients are misled, and complete novices score big gigs, only to fail and give everybody a bad name. Or they do horrendously bad work, and lower everybody’s perception of quality.
- No matter how abusive and exploitive a club, agent or client might be, there is always somebody who will accept it and enable them. This gives tyrants free reign over everybody. If nobody would work there, they would change their ways; but somebody always will take the job.
Blocking the Blockers
Will it ever be that these slimy tactics will end? No, but perhaps by bringing it out into the light, we might reduce it. Plus, perhaps when everybody knows about these tricks, people won’t drift into these behaviors.
Questions:
Have you been the victim of a Gig Blocker?
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