datamusicata

People have been asking me what I think of Sonic Bids and as its creation and existence has completely changed the booking paradigm, perhaps we should talk about the pros and cons. For those of you who have not had to deal with them yet, here is what they do.

They provide a listing of all the venues, contests, festivals, etc .,that they can find. They combine them all in one place and then they charge the artist to avail themselves of this information. An artist must pay them a fee to belong.

When an artist pays a membership fee, they get to create a web page from the Sonic Bids templates. On that site they can put up pictures, reviews, songs, bio, press releases. Everything that makes up an Electronic Press Kit (EPK). Which can be sent to anyone via email. And email seems to be what most venues prefer at this point.

For this the artist receives daily posts of “opportunities” from Sonic Bids that they may submit to. And Sonic Bids is actively contacting every venue that they can find, every contest, every conference; literally anyplace that you might want to submit your music in the effort to get work as live performance. And then, every day you get a heads up from Sonic Bids about what is available. So they are finding you all these opportunities about which you may previously have no knowledge. That’s a good thing for the artist.

There is a slight catch here, in that the artist, in addition to paying a fee to belong to Sonic Bids, must also pay a fee for each submission, be it a club, festival, song contest, whatever. These fees range between $5.00 and $35.00 per submission. I have heard people describe it as like an agent’s fee.

The spin is that you save all this money on postage and printing and you pay a nominal fee for submissions and that the venue, festival or contest decides on the fee, so most of the fee for submission is going to the one to whom the EPK being submitted.

For the venue, club, festival, etc, this is a win/win in that it is an income stream for them. Previously, these places essentially depended upon an agent who would submit acts to them via the phone and the mail. The common acceptance was that if an agent was submitting an act, then the act was probably of such a caliber that they could deliver a professional performance and would, if not instantly, eventually draw a large audience.

With the advent of Sonic Bids, any venue that works with them is receiving income to just consider an act and the act is supposed to consider this the cost of doing business. Just as they paid an agent to get them work, they now pay this fee to find out about the work and contact the venue themselves via Sonic Bids.

As an artist, I see a couple of problems from my end. Paying an Agent for the work that they get you has always been a pleasure to me. They find the venue, they get you into it and they get as much money for you as they can. You do the work, get the money and give the Agent their fair share for creating the opportunity. Guaranteed work for guaranteed money. Who wouldn’t mind sharing some of that with the Agent? I am even happy to give them a little more money than they expected just to demonstrate my appreciation.

With Sonic Bids, you are paying a fee for the “possibility” of work. No guarantees. And the fees, at $5.00 to $35.00 per submission don’t begin to equate to printing and mailing costs which come to roughly $5.00 a package for me. Do the math. The average between the two fees is $20.00. So each submission for work will cost the Sonic Bids artist roughly $20.00. If the artist submits to a hundred venues a year (not an unreasonable submission rate), then the artist has spent $2000.00 with utterly no guarantee of work. The fee paid to an agent is for actual money earned. This is a fee for just the potential of work and meanwhile the venue makes money on every submission. What venue wouldn’t want to be part of this?

Before Sonic Bids and without an agent, I would submit to roughly fifty new places a year, and I have all the regular places who know me and would have me back whenever I am in the area as well. So I was spending about $250 per year on submissions. And perhaps twice that for all the press mailings.

With the advent of the internet, those costs have gone down. My webpage has everything that any agent or press agent or booker or manager or journalist or critic or TV producer or audient might need to ascertain whether I am worthy of hiring, reviewing or attending.

And there is MySpace which also has all the same kinds of material. For free. So for an internet presence and to provide all this PR and music to anyone you don’t need Sonic Bids, but if you have no other site, then this is probably a good thing for you. You put everything up on the site that you pay them to provide and you receive all these opportunities daily. But for an extra fee, don’t forget.

My feeling regarding Sonic Bids is that they have managed to create a space between the artist and the venue. They have placed themselves in that space and they extract money from the artist who needs the venue to survive as an artist.

I don’t know of any real booking agencies that use Sonic Bids, so I suspect that they are there for the rank amateur up to the undiscovered greats who are pulling their own wagon. Everyone who is famous has no need of Sonic Bids, so I believe the site is basically for the unknown or not well known artists. Sonic Bids does provide a service for those people and there is also the fact that once you get into these venues, if you are any good, or have brought in lots of people (one doesn’t necessarily equate with the other), then you can go back to that venue without using Sonic Bids.

So ideally, you would use Sonic Bids to get in the door. Then it’s up to you. For myself, I only use Sonic Bids when I have absolutely no other way to achieve what I want to have happen.