Tag Archives: pay-to-play

The Musicians’ Union Fair Play Venues Scheme – Sheena Macdonald

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This week’s blog post explains the rationale behind the Musicians’ Union Fair Play Venues scheme. Sheena Macdonald – Musicians’ Union Regional Organiser for Scotland and Northern Ireland – discusses the background to the scheme and opportunities for musicians to participate. I came to my job at the Musicians’ Union (MU) as a fan, a fan of live music. And like …  

Playing for nothing – Simon Frith

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This week’s guest blog is by Simon Frith, in which he muses on the perennial problem about musicians playing for free and suggests that the problem of ‘playing for free’ is caused by the ‘exploitation’ of live musicians by the people who make money out of them.  

The pervasive curse of pay-to-play in Tokyo – James Hadfield

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Today’s guest post is by James Hadfield, an English writer and photographer based in Tokyo, where he writes about music and other subjects for The Japan Times and Tokyo TimeOut amongst others. In this piece he looks at the ubiquity of pay-to-play, or noruma, in the Japanese capital.  

Planning and pulling off a DIY tour – Asher Baker

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Today we present a guest post by Asher Baker, an acoustic punk singer songwriter from London who performs under the name Chapter Eleven. Here he draws upon his experience of many gigs across the country to offer guidelines on how to organise a small scale DIY tour.