Or tea v coffee, dark v milk chocolate, boxers v pants….you get the idea I think. Related things that are very much personal taste where you’re asked what’s better, when, unless you like tea and coffee and are judging the finest Arabica against the PDM tea, which is blended from old tea bags we found in a dump and put in a sock, you really can’t easily compare, let alone chose one over another.
To understand Battle of the Bands (BotB to save my typing fingers) is to be able to make a decision about whether to take part in it or not.
I’ll go on a slight diversion while I think about it. In 1978 Stiff Records went up and down the country looking for the best New Wave bands, something called the Stiff Records Test / Chiswick Challenge. Joy Division won the competition in Manchester. The Factory Records team were there too and signed them up. That won’t happen to your, or my, band playing a BotB organised by the Landlord of our local pub.
Anyway, enough of a diversion, back to the point….assuming there is one.
Let’s look at four aspects of a BotB: prizes, venue/promoter, deciding a winner & band.
Prizes.
This is a good indicator of the quality of the competition. If it’s £5000 worth of studio time and a meeting with the head of A&R at Sony then that’s a lot more interesting than a certificate saying ‘Best Band in Llanbobble – 2010’. It may be that you want to be recognised as the best band in Llanbobble, and that’s fine. It’s not for me to say whether the prizes are good or bad, but I can say look at what’s on offer as that’ll give you an idea of whether it’s something that want to sign up for and go out fighting tooth and nail to win or decide that it’s not worth the effort.
Venue/promoter
Being an old romantic I’d like to think that there’s still a small number of BotBs that are about finding and developing fantastic new talent. So I’ll talk about the 99.9% that aren’t.
The bottom lines are either money or association with success, with a bit of quick rosta building thrown in as well sometimes.
Pubs and Clubs exist to sell drink. That’s pretty much their sole purpose. If they can get four bands with an average of four people in on a quiet Tuesday night then that’s 16 people that wouldn’t ordinarily be drinking there that they can sell to. If those bands also bring family and/or fans along that’s even better.
Commercial Promoters, so excluding the likes of PDM, want to make money. Maybe they’re getting a percentage of the bar, maybe a fixed amount from the pub because the pub will hope to make more on the night; maybe they’re charging entry and not paying the bands anything. Make your BotB a popularity competition where the band with the most audience votes wins and bands are likely to encourage more people along….more drink sold, more tickets sold etc etc etc.
Association with success is linked to publicity and is where you’ll find a sponsor, if there is one, of the whole BotB or the companies giving prizes. Bands will get to see the name and logo of the sponsors and the sponsors will get to be linked with, hopefully, a fantastic eventual winner. For a relatively small outlay, £25 voucher to spend in their shop, a day’s recording etc. the brand can become better known to a very targeted audience. This isn’t a bad thing, I’m as happy as anyone to slap the PDM brand on anything relevant and of the right quality as a way of promoting what we do.
New promoters can quickly set up a BotB to help build their rosta, that is having bands come to them and for the promoter to be able to assess who’s any good, who brings the most people, etc so that they can know who may make them a profit at future gigs they may put on.
Deciding a winner.
So, who decides who wins? There are all sorts of ways to decide a winner. Ones I know of are loudest cheer at the end of the night, audience members vote on the way out, a panel of judges scoring against set criteria (stagecraft, song writing etc) and bar staff decide who they like the most.
I recently heard of one where you got a vote each time you bought a drink. That’s astoundingly irresponsible and I would suggest that anything like that be avoided. You may win because you’ve got a load of mates who can drink like fish but if they’ve been encouraged to get tanked up because of the organisation of the competition and something happens to them on the way home some of the responsibility will have to lie with the promoter/venue and to some extent the band.
Other than that, very, wrong way of deciding the winner, no way is better than another, because they’re all flawed depending on how you want look at them.
The best, most creative, most groundbreaking band may not win because they were too leftfield or because they only brought three mates with them. The most out of tune, out of time, clichéd three chord Indi band may win because it’s their first gig and all their family and friends came along to support them.
We’re back to the tea v coffee thing, it may be that people like my tea in a sock more than your excellent coffee. Keep going though as one cup of my tea is all anyone can drink and people who find a good coffee stick with it. OK that’s a poor motivational moment, but one was needed….just one better than that.
Bands
I kept bands to last as I wanted you to read all the other stuff first. I’m not going to say to a band do, or don’t, enter a BotB. There are lots of reasons not to and lots of reasons to enter. I’ll give you an example.
The band I’m in is entered in a BotB starting in a couple of months. We’re doing if for two reasons. Firstly, we love playing the venue, it’s one of our favourite venues and we’ll take just about any chance we can to play there, and, secondly, we’ll, hopefully, get to play to some people that haven’t seen us before. Basically, we’re treating it like any gig. We’ll do our best to get people along, we’ll play our socks off and try and entertain the people that are there and if someone or somehow it’s decided that we get to do the same again at another gig, or next round as they call it, then all the better but that, or prizes isn’t the deal clincher for us. The deal clincher is the venue and the chance to play to new people.
If you’re going to enter, go into it knowing what they are and the reasons behind them, make sure that the venue and promoter are working at making this a success as well and have fun.
As always, respect the other bands because even if they win and are worse than you they’ll have put some effort in and done something that means that they get through. It isn’t the end of the world to loose a BotB and it’s not demeaning to music to enter, because they’re a bit of marketing spin on what is otherwise just a gig.
Paul
www.pdmmusic.com
