The Question of Money Has Been Raised - Monthly Mess Transparency

The Monthly Mess is approaching its 4th monthly installment (June 27th, at the Playhouse 5656 Parc) and has had well over 40 artists involved and many hundreds of attendees as well. In an effort to broach the often embarrassing or uncomfortable question of money (bling, clams, cash, bucks, kuai, coin, ka-ching) or lack thereof, I felt it timely to post these responses to the question of “Where does the money raised at a Monthly Mess show go?” The Monthly Mess is truely dedicated to exposing artists of many various forms to each other and to the world at large.

I wrote
Here is a response to your question pieced together from an exchange between Risa Dickens and myself pertaining to your question. I want to say that putting together a show of this type really does take a good amount of time and that we do have expenses for the shows. If we aren’t renting equipment for one show we are paying for beers at another. We want to be able to pay artists and I think we can and will be able to in the future. We actually did pay the artists at the first show each $3 ontop of free beer. $3 bucks is really not much but that was the even share between everyone. Most people scoffed at the amount and so we decided that it makes more sense to pay the producer of the show as well as Risa + Elran (the Indyish backbone) some, and after costs it really is nothing to write home about. And the 50/50 split is something new to try.

Risa Dickens, who is many vertabrae in the Indyish backbone, wrote this.
In response to the money question- as it stands now we split the profits with you 50/50. that’s for your work and our work every month putting it together and maintaining the site that attracts people to it, doing the myspace, facebook, emailing, blogging. We split whatever’s left after costs (so if we print flyers, pay for performers’ beers, subsidize some travel, or rent equipment that comes out first, and when we do that there’s pretty much nothing left, so we try not to do it every month). The shows have been ‘pay what you can’.

When we have rent and food covered, we start to save up for stuff that would be good to have, like a laptop (indyish has no laptop. Embarassing but true), or a new hard drive (the computers El and I run indyish off of are on their last legs, truth be told, only hangin on because they’re linux and can work ’til there’s nothing left, our windows machines which are now officially dead and gone) or our rapidly-mounting server costs (we’ve had to upgrade servers already this year and we’ll need to again as soon as we have time and money enough put aside to do it). Because our traffic is high and we post video and audio etc, our bandwidth is high and tends to outstrip anything we make on advertising or websales so far. Most Months we don’t make enough to cover all this, so we run the credit cards just a little further into the ground, and we try to cram in a few hours of contract work at night when money’s really tight.

For now we think it makes sense to keep it as a showcase - something the artists don’t get paid for, they just get some visibility, networking and beer from. Lots of other places will actually try to charge bands to be in a showcase, which we’ll never do. And unless we’re paying bands we think it should be kept as a Pay What You can experience - their friends and family shouldn’t feel like they’re paying 10 bucks that doesn’t go to the artists. We’re really focused now on getting things together enough that we can pay the people who make these things happen and be good. For now we think it should go to the show’s producers, not least because with at least 8 acts per mess, we end up giving each act like 2$ if we split it and that feels goofy and more complicated then it’s worth.

(I wrote)
This is really what I had figured. I think a lot of people don’t know the true expenses of things and (not to say that people are greedy, which most are anyways, lol) but people have a desire to see that their effort is rewarded and if for some ‘getting older artists’ that have been performing now for 10+ years and still not making a living doing it (which is truly the exception I think, only doing one’s art and making a living doing that) I can see the frustration of sorts. I mean we are all in that boat.

I think something that some of the artists involved don’t even think about is the effort that you and El and the Indyish volunteers have done to get Indyish to this point where some people have actually heard about it, checked it out (website) and want to attend the shows. That alone has been a lot of work for sure.

I agree that the fact that artists don’t have to pay to be involved (which is unbelievable to me that they have to on most occasions elsewhere) and that there is an audience that actually cares to listen.

See this question about money was posed to me by an artist that has performed in a prior Monthly Mess and she even stated during her performance that she couldn’t believe how receptive and attentive the audience was for being in the bar setting. I think that this is some of the character that is represented from the top on down of Indyish and filters into the people attending the shows, that we fucking care about art and artists and so does the audience.

(end of email exchange)
I wanted to thank you for asking this question and I think I will write a blog post to make the actions of Indyish more transparent to all concerned. I hope this answers your question and that you will continue to want to work with us into the future. We are all giving of ourselves at this point but the ones that give now won’t be forgotten in the future if ever we are able to pay the artists more than beer. Thanks again and I hope you find the truth is this response and want to still be a part.

- euphoreador -

contact me josh (at) indyish (dot) com