2010 Sound Support Scheme

I’ve been working away at this for the past few weeks so it’s great to finally put it out into the world and see what happens.

The idea came to me driving home from a gig one night around Christmas. Wouldn’t it be great if bands, venue owners and promoters could fix their audio costs for a year like they fix any other cost? And spread the payments for the year over a few months? Insurance costs, rent and vehicle costs are fixed for a year, why can’t we do the same with audio hire.

Say your band does 35 gigs a year and you are based in Dublin. You might pay one rate for PA hire and crew in Dublin but once you go elsewhere in the country for gigs, you end up maybe hiring from another local company and paying a bit less. But the gear is different and you aren’t sure what you will end up with on the night. So... you decide to rent from your regular Dublin PA company but they have to charge more than usual to drive to wherever the gig is. So some nights you pay €400 and some nights you pay maybe €600 for PA and crew. But you still get the same fee for playing in Dublin as you do in Kerry. You can see where this is heading....

Or say you have a venue where you put on gigs 20 times a year. You want the same PA system for these of these 20 gigs but you can’t afford to buy it. So you rent it in for each gig. But maybe one or two gigs don’t sell so well and you lose money on the night. What if you could spread the annual payments over 7 months, giving you some cover for shows that don’t do so well on the door and letting you make a killing on the busy nights

Or you run a 3 day festival once a year and a few shows around Ireland for the rest of the year. After a festival everyone wants to get paid. The bands, the lighting and sound companies, the stage company, security, advertising company, the portaloo guy etc etc etc. But you’re waiting on the money from the ticket sales and the concessions to come in and we know how long that takes. What if you could spread the PA cost over 7 months? Would that help?

The
Sound Support Scheme provides a solution to all these problems.

You get a fixed price for an agreed specification. The crew costs and transport costs to anywhere in Ireland are all included. You pay an upfront fee of 25% and then 6 equal monthly payments.

So if you’re a band playing around the country, you pay the same cost for a gig in Donegal as a gig in Cork. If you start the scheme in say April, by November you’ve paid for the PA. And that means that you pocket all the money from the gigs from December until March but you still have a PA system.

For any more info, have a read of the
Sound Support page on the website or contact me for more information


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