We’ve been wondering for a while if it’s possible to determine what a correct fee is?

By working with both bigger and smaller artists, we often notice quite a big disparity in prices. Booking a big headliner sometimes means underpaying locals. However, we do acknowledge that for someone to spend two days travelling to perform, is more work than a local who can go back to their own home and that this should be compensated for.

We thus wonder:

Is it possible to create a system of equity between local and international artists where everyone is paid correctly?

For our next event at Recyclart, we propose a fee per working day. Instead of paying just for a show, we imagine the day of the show to be a working day, but also the day of travelling. Within our current budget, we were able to afford 250€ per working day. All local artists thus get 250€, all international artists get 500€. At this price, you have to imagine that depending on where they’re taxed, they might still lose up to 40% of this. At 500€/show, an artist would have to play at a constant schedule of at least 4 shows per month to survive. Furthermore, the multiple days working to prepare the set are still left uncompensated.

Within this DIY effort for equity, we are still left wondering how to actually live off alternative music?

Within the context of rising prices and paying people correctly, we think it might be important to show what an event like this one exactly costs, to open the discussion to you, the reveller. MONTAGE does not receive any grants at the moment, so we depend fully on ticketing sales to fund events such as these.

Our lovely dancers, you, pay for the artist fees, costs and provide MONTAGE a working budget to run the label with. We thus thought it could be interesting to host an open budget for this event. On the next slide you see an in-depth look at the costs.

With 4 local artists and 3 international artists being paid 250€ per working day, this puts the expenditure in artist fees at a total of 2500€, or 44% of the total budget. The venue fees for Recyclart sit at 1500€, which includes security, maintenance of the site and technical equipment, two technicians, a production officer, logistics, communication, an awareness team, stewards, the bar, the clean-up, the maintenance and cleaning of toilets, the fire insurance, water, electricity… The licensing of the music (SABAM + bookingfees) sits around 700€, but it still depends if there is copyrighted music being played. We keep the SABAM discussion for another time. Total travel costs are budgeted at around 600€ and catering + hospitality for the artists amounts to 300€.

We try to let artists sleep locally at friends’ places, but it doesn’t always work out, so there is one hotel room in the hospitality costs. Between transport, licensing, catering & hospitality, these small but unavoidable costs amount for around 30% of the budget. This creates a total of +/- 5500€, which means we need 486 people to run break-even at this event, or 81% sold-out.

Organising equity is possible, but it takes a risk.

Furthermore, there are still a lot of shortcomings to this set-up. We still rely heavily on unpaid labour for big parts of the organisation. Artist care, ticketing, ground transport, graphic design, visuals, set-up & breakdown are sadly still unpaid roles. Important to note is that this unpaid labour requires a certain level of financial privilege. If you have someone to take care of or are struggling to make rent, good luck being involved in the creative sector. Furthermore, the venue fee of Recyclart does not actually cover the real cost of running such a big and complex space. Without government support, the rent would thus be higher, meaning more financial difficulty. Finally, we are still left with a disparity between local and international artists. While we think 250 and 500 feel like correct fees, the fact that one is double the other leaves us with a sour taste. We would like to open the question to you, the revellers:

Does this feel like a correct way of spending your money? Do you feel our ticket pricing is apt for this budget?