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CEE Worldwide Entertainment Agency | August 3, 2011
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Is Entertainment Ethical?

I have to admit this is a question I often ponder. In this article I seek to put my thoughts into words, perhaps you may or may not agree with them.

There are many within the entertainment industry that will do whatever it takes to climb the heights of success or to just get bookings. It doesn’t matter if they are a global superstar or John Doe the Singing Milkman. If I am honest for most the world of the superstar is far removed from everyday and everyday is where I wish to concentrate for the most part.

There are a lot of great ethical acts in the entertainment industry who are penalised by the unethical ones. The last few years has seen a change taking place within the entertainment industry, and the rise in popularity of shows like X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent has made everyone feel they can be a star; which is far from the reality. Whilst the numbers of those within the entertainment industry has risen, the number of venues has fallen, creating a wider disparity than originally existed. The market has become flooded and many acts are not of a suitable standard to even be in the industry, yet they remain a part of it why?

Well much of this comes down to ethics. An established act with a pedigree costs a lot more to book, also an established act is more likely to be doing things correctly and ethically which also raises costs. You are probably wondering how being ethical can increase costs and that is what we will look at.

When you book an experienced and ethical act what do you actually get for the money. Well hopefully you get an act that is honest, competent, professional, flexible and experienced, which understands their craft. For that you pay a premium to start. Then there is the ethical side to the equation, which also adds to the costs. A professional act will be insured, have safe equipment, reliable well maintained transport, pay tax, pay national insurance, perhaps dues to professional bodies as well as management and/or agents fees. They will also pay for relevant licences to carry out their profession legally. Not only does the income as an entertainer pay there wages part is also reinvested in updating to newer equipment and/or other aspects of a show. A stage magician has the cost of having new stage tricks constructed.

The unethical acts often use second hand equipment which is poorly maintained, have no insurance, have transport which is unreliable, do not pay tax or national insurance and do not work professionally.

What this means is that the unethical can offer services far cheaper than those who do work ethically. The margins on costs can run into hundreds of pounds and doing things right costs money.

Hiring an unethical act is conning yourself. Why? Well lets take just the taxation issue. Superstars go abroad to avoid taxes so why should others pay them? Here is why.

In today’s economy we all need to contribute, superstars abroad don’t put a strain on services they don’t contribute to. Taxes pay for children’s education, hospitals, and the care of the elderly, roads, policing, and a whole lot more. Those who work unethically in entertainment use those services without contributing, instead those who pay taxes pay for them. Yet venues and the public will book them. Everyone will do the occasional cash in hand off the books gig and I have no problem accepting that. It is the blatant, continued non contribution that frustrates and annoys me.

Booking unethical acts can put people at risk, and if god forbid an accident occurred who will be sued? Most likely the person who made the booking!!!

Ethical acts will also give fair and unbiased advice. They know being honest is important and will always do there best not to mis-inform or mislead. Unethical acts have no problem using any tactics to get bookings.

Few other industries would allow such lax standards or for people to get away with what many do within the entertainment industry. I for one would like to see acts have to show they are tax registered, have PLI, PAT and any other licences required before they can be booked and for it to be a criminal offence to book any act that cannot show the relevant documentation, with substantial fines, not polite warnings.

If all were held to the same basic standards with bookers just paying a premium for experience the playing fields would be a lot leveller and fairer. Of course bookers and venues play their own part in this ethical debate. They think that cheap is a good thing, some venues actively encourage acts to work “off the books” as it were so as to cut costs, so fueling the disparity and encouraging the cutting of corners. You may book cheap entertainment, but as the saying goes You Get What You Pay For. Put on a few cheap rubbish acts and it will kill trade, venues get a name for putting on bad acts so people avoid them, ultimately this can lead to a venue closing due to lack of funds, When that happens the ratio of acts to venues increases again. It is a spiral that just keeps revolving.

We all have a part to play to improve the ethical side of the entertainment industry, and we can all make a concious effort today to do so.

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©2011. Paul Sims. All Rights Reserved.

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CEE Worldwide Entertainment Agency | March 29, 2011
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The Cost Of Selling Your Digital Music Online.

So you are a band or musical act and would like to sell your music digitally online, in a secure way. The easiest way is to use a digital music distribution site, but what are the potential costs of doing so.

To use as an example we have choosen CD Baby a well known digital music distibution site, and will use its own prices as a demonstration.

Firstly if you wish to sell your music you have to register for a membership account which is similar for most sites of this type. Once registered you can then proceed to upload your music to sell online. The process seems simple enough, and it is. It is why people use these types of service. However, once registered and you want to start uploading you begin to find out the true cost of doing so. Most people do not read the small print or other terms they just sign up, and that as this article will show is a huge mistake.

Above you can see the CD Baby pricing page in the frame, if you cannot see the frame you can always visit the web page. You can see from the page in question that we have not invented any figures etc.

So you have your account and now want to upload some music. You decide to upload say 3 albums of your music, so let us look at the first entry in the pricing table. Album signup is $39.00 per album so 3 albums will cost $117.00 yes $117.00 and you haven’t even sold anything. So you have paid money to upload your music and have paid to do so in the hope of making sales, does this seem right to you? Next say you want to upload 3 single tracks, as an album perhaps contains 10 or more a single track will be free or cost very little, well lets take a look. Looking at the second entry in the pricing chart we see the cost of upload for each single track which is $9.95 per single so your 3 singles will cost, wait for it $29.85 and you haven’t made any sales. So 3 albums and 3 singles have cost you a total of $146.85. I think you will agree that is a reasonable outlay and without a single track sold.

If you then decide you want extras such as a UPC barcode that is another $20.00 per album and $5.00 per single. Those prices soon add up.

So you can see you can spend a lot of money before you have even potentially made a sale. And remember you aren’t guranteed to make any sales at all. So what happens if you make a sale? Well then for each item sold you ALSO pay a commission. Yes more expense, on top of what you have already paid out.

So if we scroll down the page we see the section regarding how much CD Baby pays you. The second box down deals with downloads where it states you get 75% of sale fee which means CD Baby gets 25%. The following is a direct excerpt from that entry “We keep 25% of the purchase price with a minimum of 29 cents. For a download that sells for $9.99 you get paid $7.49, and for a single that sells for 99 cents you get paid 70¢.” Have you noticed that the minimum is 29 cents which means that on a $1.00 download you are actually paying 29% commission if that was a $0.50 sale you would be paying a whopping 58% commission. Yes it really does pay to read the small print and thing about it. On another page completely, click here to view it, they claim “Make the highest profit margin of any online store
Get paid 70¢ for any single you sell for 99¢. For multiple singles transactions, we keep only 25% (minimum 29¢) and pay you a whopping 75% per download sold on our store – more than iTunes, Amazon, and other retailers.” Not completely factual as it is not always 75% due to the minimum charge already mentioned. One other thing to bear in mind is that they claim to pay more than other reatilers in commission, However i doubt they check all the potential competition just the big guns so you can probably find better deals by looking around. New site Music Acts Tracks charges just 20% commission and has a commission price promise too.

So is it easy to find cheaper alternatives. The answer is YES. Music Acts Tracks offers you the ability to do just that. There are no registration charges. There are no upload fees. You just pay 20% commission which is backed by Music acts Tracks commission price promise. It really is that simple.

© Paul Sims 2011

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CEE Worldwide Entertainment Agency | April 18, 2009
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We Are The Biggest, Best, And No1?

Like many people I often browse the World Wide Web looking for something new. Not only do I do this for pleasure but also in my job when looking for new acts for the entertainment agency of which I am CEO.

Frequently I come across sites claiming to be The Biggest, The Best or No.1 in their particular field and this made me wonder. If you look long enough at the net you will find these claims by numerous companies within the same field, so who is The Biggest, The Best or No.1.

I thought long and hard about this and to be honest I don’t know, but it would seem to be just a marketing tactic in most cases. We all know that market research companies and the like often rate well-known companies independently, but this is not the case in most businesses. High street names are well known as are an international manufacturing company, which however is not quite so true on the web.

Perhaps it would be a good idea for Internet companies who make these claims to back it up with independent clarification or not make them at all. That way everyone would know if the claims made are real. The other question I then find myself asking is if these companies are making dubious claims as a marketing tactic what other dubious practices are they up to. Yes I know lots of questions that just seem to raise more.

A case in point that all this reminded me of was a friend of mine many years ago who stated on his website that his company had been voted No.1 in a particular field. I queried this with him one day and asked about it. He replied that he had asked his family to vote and they had voted him No.1. Hardly surprising! He then used this as a promotional gimmick. Whilst his family may have voted, the vote was an obviously biased one and not in the true spirit of competition. It is also true that because a vote had taken place he was not technically lying, but it was most certainly a very distorted view that he painted. These are tactics that companies I am sure use everyday on the web.

This leads me on to my next point. Just because a company is number one for a particular keyword or set of keywords on the Internet does not necessarily mean they are The Biggest, The Best or No.1. It just means that for a particular keyword their website is better optimized for it than others. If you look around you will probably find that they rank lower on other search engines for the same keywords. Another indication is page rank; check the actual page rank and you will often find lower page rank sites above higher page rank ones, it’s not about good content it is about optimization. How do I know this, well from the experience of my own company? We have a Google page rank of 3 yet we are behind others of lower page rank 1-2 for certain keywords. Not that this matters to us, as we know we have a good product range and solid client base.

The point of this article is to say be aware. Just because a site makes a claim it does not mean it is true. Anything can be manipulated to make one thing seem like something else, we see it in government, and on the news all the time. It’s spin doctoring pure and simple. So next time you are looking for something don’t just go for the company claiming to be The Biggest, The Best or No.1 look further and you might be surprised at what you find. The other thing to remember is if a company has to make the claim of being The Biggest, The Best or No.1 they are probably trying to cover up something, a good company has no need to make those claims, the product or service speaks for itself.

Here are some quotes taken from pages or advertising of five entertainment agencies in the UK within the last 24 hours:

“the country’s fastest growing provider of live entertainment”

“the UK’s premier live music agency and the largest online entertainment booking service in the world”

“The UK’s No1 Entertainment Agency”

“UK’s leading entertainment specialist”

“the leading UK based live entertainment service provider”

I’d like to wish anyone who reads this happy surfing and hope that it has made you think a little.

© Paul Sims 2008
CEE Worldwide Entertainment Agency

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CEE Worldwide Entertainment Agency | April 18, 2009
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The Cost Of Entertainment

I know I should not be, but the truth is, I still find that many people have unrealistic expectations when it comes to the cost of entertainment.

So often we get inquiries from people looking for entertainment, such as a tribute band, and quoting a budget of £250.00 or less. If you think about it you can see just how unrealistic this is. Perhaps 30 years ago this would have been a fair amount to spend and would have brought you a great act, but not nowadays. In the 1970′s you could hire a really good mobile disco for £10 – £15 for a night, the same nowadays will cost you around £300.

The cost of entertainment is now relative to earnings, in the 1970′s people maybe earnt £30.00 a week, now the average is £300.00. You could buy a house in the 1970′s for £20,000 now you will find that one will cost around £200,000. Costs do not stand still, we do not live in a time warp, and todays entertainment costs reflect that.

I often think how nice it would be if people actually were realistic in their expectations of what entertainment will cost them. Entertainment acts unlike high street shops do not have sales, but unlike high street shops the price is fairly constant. To see what I mean lets use supermarkets as an example. When you go into a supermarket you fancy a cream cake, you find a pack of chocolate éclairs that are on offer at £1.00 reduced from £1.20 this promotion lasts for say 4 weeks then when you go in and fancy an éclair you find that the price is £1.25, a five pence increase on what the original price had been. This is common in all forms of shopping, but shopping for entertainment is different.

It can be a year or two before an act increases prices and some acts prices do not increase for even longer periods. An act charges what it feels it is worth, not on what current market trends are. Yes you can find cheap acts, but ask yourself what is the quality of those acts, and why do they charge so little. When booking entertainment be realistic in your expectations of what you expect to pay, ask yourself what would you charge if you were a really good act. I asked my wife what she would expect to pay for a tribute act and she said around £1000.00 perhaps a lot more maybe a little less. This is a realistic figure and reflective of todays costs.

Before you think about booking entertainment, give some thought to what the real cost will be. Do not just pluck a figure out of the air, make some inquiries, and let yourself be informed. Being informed means that you can make a sensible choice for the entertainment that you need.

© Paul Sims 2009.

CEE Worldwide Entertainment Agency

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CEE Worldwide Entertainment Agency | March 13, 2009
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Digital Kills The Wedding DJ

This article has been prompted by one that appeared in The Times Online some time ago. If you would like to read the original article please use the following link The Times Online.

The article refers to how some couples are using ipods to supply their wedding reception music as opposed to hiring a DJ, although this could also apply to any other event.

This may seem like a good money saving idea, but lets take a closer look at what it means in reality. I agree that couples could save money on hiring a DJ but, and it is a big BUT, what are the potential ramifications of doing so legally.

Firstly in the UK any electrical equipment used in a public place and accessible to the public must have PAT (Portable Appliance Test). This is to make sure that the device is safe electrically. That means using an ipod with any form of mains supply either to the ipod itself or a mains powered docking station must have PAT. There are many companies doing PAT, usually charging per item, but most also have a minimum fee of around £70.00 plus VAT.

The second factor is if extra amplification is required then it will mean hiring additional equipment which will also add to the overall cost.

The third factor is that an ipod does not come with any lighting which mean the hire of lighting effects if you want some.

It is now we hit the major stumbling block. If you are using such equipment you must be conversant with its safety and operating instructions. Why is this? Because you will be liable to be sued if anyone at the event has an accident, and if you have no knowledge of the safety and operating instructions then you cannot mount an active defense should the matter go to court. The next point to this is that to offset any possible action for injury you will have to have PLI (Public Liability Insurance). Yes the venue may have it but it is you who are responsible not the venue. PLI is not cheap to obtain, and if you read most small print it will require that all electrical items have a valid and current PAT, otherwise the PLI is void. PLI is a legal requirement.

Lets do some simple maths at this point:

PAT £70.00
PLI £150.00 (though you may get it cheaper)
Equipment hire £60.00 (hire equipment must already have PAT)

Total cost £280.00

Next let us take a look at using an ipod for your musical entertainment. You have downloaded your songs the party is going well, and then a guest wants a particular track, do you stop the music to download it as you don’t have it already or do you just say they can’t have it and risk offending them. This is something that should be considered, also how much do you spend downloading the tracks in the first place.

There is available a system that has 60,000+ tracks available to play, and which you can hire from certain places. Basically it is a large digital jukebox for want of a description cost on average £300.00, and yes it can do requests, but what happens when someone puts on a track they love that clears the dance floor. Or will the music someone likes and puts on offends other people at the event.

A good quality DJ will set you back on average £300.00 for the evening, some cost more some less, but £300.00 is a fair price, unless you have special requirements. A good quality DJ will also have PLI and all equipment will have PAT, if it is required. A DJ can also play requests, and adapt to different situations, being human has advantages. Then there are the times someone wants a request but can’t remember the title of the track and is also not sure who recorded it so they try and sing it to the DJ hoping they will know, now you can’t do that to a machine.

When all is said and done to be legal and do it yourself will cost the same if not more than getting someone to do it for you. The other benefit is they will also set all the equipment up and take it all down, and there is no having to return the hired equipment which saves on time too.

I hope the above has made you think a little, sometimes it is better to get a professional rather than DIY.

© Paul Sims

CEE Worldwide Entertainment Agency

We would like to thank The Times Online for allowing us to link to their original article. We would also like to thank the articles author Carol Midgley for her work, were it not for her this article may never have been written.

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