Music-Box Music-Box - Keep Live Music Alive.

www.kentfolk.com

Live-music in Kent and East Sussex is dying off rapidly, see my graph of weekly live-music in Kent and East Sussex.
The credit-crunch is not helping, and people are increasingly worried about the drink-drive limits. Nationally pubs were going out of business at 39 per week, at the start of 2008 - any guess what the figure looks like now ?

Now if this music were at a folk club you pay entry plus the drinks you buy, and then at least part of the evening the acts would just be unpaid floor-spots.

So the suggestion is, why not pay a little more for the music you want, in the pub you want it in ?

The proposal is to have a [Music-Box] on the bar.

The idea is, if you are there for the music, think what you would have been willing to pay in a folk-club, and put some money in the box - particularly if you are driking lightly or say are designated driver and can not drink.

The suggested way this would work is, the publican gets half the money, up to the agreed cost of the band, and the musicians get the rest. The musicians can do what they like with their half (including buy food), but the intention is that they will use some of it as a subsidy to their cost at future gigs - either use it all to lower their cost to the next pub gig they book, or say take £20 off each of a few of the next gigs. The more the musicians get into their music box, the better value they will be, and the more we will get to hear them.

To help judge if this is a viable scheme, or pie-in-the-sky, we will run a trial for one music event,
the Longstone-Camine gig at the Evenhill, Littlebourne, CT3 1TA, 20th Feb. 2009.
So no obligation to put anything in, but just ask yourself what you will do in a couple of years if my graph is right and the music has gone !

We will see if this baby will fly ....
There is a discussion on this and related matters, at :
www.kentfolk.com/News/
Keeping Live Music Alive
cheers, Beau