Pay To Play Hits Twitter

One of the most terrible things in the music industry is ‘pay to play’ gigs, where someone offers you an opportunity, but it comes with a price.

Early on in your career this will come in the form of the opportunity to play a large venue with several other small bands as some king of showcase. The only catch is you have to sell 50 or 100 tickets at an inflated price for what you’d normally ask your audience to pay to see you, and in return you get 50% of the revenue for every ticket you sell over that.

As you progress though it’ll become offers to open for larger acts than yourself on tour in return for ‘tour support’ where for a buy-on, you get the gigs and the act get money to promote the tour. Or, more frequently, to pay rent and buy cheap French sticks and selection packs of cold cut meats and jars of olives for ‘dinner’ backstage.

Then producers will be offered to you because they magically have a week or so open up in their diary that they’re willing to give to you for a cut down rate and points on the release, so they get an inflated royalty rate.

And magazines and music channels will hit you up because they want to do a feature on an artist as fantastic as you, but in order to unlock the feature you need to help them fill an advertising gap.

There comes a time in your career as a musician that these opportunities just become offensive.

Mash Gang are frequently offered opportunities to be included in listicles or otherwise featured somewhere, and we always decline, politely pointing out we almost all come from a background in music, are used to pay to play and we’re too old and wise to donate a couple of t-shirts for a competition, pay to be included in a seasonal newspaper article, pay for the opportunity of having you sell our product at a pop-up you’re going to run, or pay to cover your expenses to take a picture of one of our beers and post it on your Instagram account with a glowing review.

This may come as a shock, but it’s probably even more common and accepted in alc/FMCG as it is in music.

This pay to play behaviour is apparently now coming to Twitter in the form of $20 monthly subscriptions to get/retain a blue verification tick.

In short, when I read about this on Sunday night, I thought this would probably mean Twitter would need to change radically as a platform in a short period of time, or it would be a ghost town in two years.

Clubhouse was amazing when it was full of actual celebs and business builders doing Q&A sessions, but when they left it was just a bunch of people talking about conspiracy theories and trying to sell NFT and crypto scams.

The point is, without the people of interest, it was a shit bin. Who wants to listen to the racist ramblings of idiots about vaccines or grifters trying to empty your bank?

Which leads me to the exchange between Stephen King and Elon Musk this morning on Twitter:

No disrespect to Dr Disrespect, but after we pause to consider how close life is now to an Onion article, let’s focus on the exchange before his comment.

Stephen King is a world famous content creator. He’s one of the most popular and successful story tellers alive today, and used to getting paid to write words for a living. He’s prolific to the point he’s written sixty four novels and two hundred short stories in his seventy five years on the big spinning ball, which have sold three hundred and fifty million copies.

He is on Twitter because it is the internet’s town square.

Stephen King is wildly aware that seven million people follow him on the platform, that his tweets reach millions and keep them on the platform, and that in and around his tweets and the replies are adverts which generate money for Twitter and thus Elon.

So the idea of him and others paying $20 a month for the opportunity to create content for free for Twitter to earn revenue from running adverts against has hit home like throwing a tiger in a deep fat fryer. As it should. This is pay to play taken in a new direction, as we see from the replies to Stephen telling him that he should be thankful for Twitter because without it he would no longer be relevant.

Except the reality is the opposite is true. Remember what I said about Clubhouse?

Now imagine Twitter without the public figures.

Right back at the start I mentioned how baby bands are offered the opportunity to sell tickets for an inflated rate to play bigger venues with a slab of other baby bands. What I didn’t mention then was that if you don’t sell the floor of tickets, you’re expected to pay to make up the difference. You do so thinking it’s rad and you’ll still be playing a big, packed venue. But on the rainy Tuesday night of the show, you turn up to the six hundred capacity venue to meet the four other bands you’re playing with, and discover it’s a mostly empty hall, with a hundred or so people in it and feel like a total mug.

You’ve all paid to play to a big empty room, when you could have put the gig on five minutes down the road, lowered the price by a third, sold out, and made enough money to pay for strings and chips.

That’s where Twitter is currently heading.

Sure, Elon may now make bank from having 10x the number of verified accounts, but who wants to have a verified WeedLord420 account when the pantheon you now stand amidst is only other people named DogeCoinz666, BTSSTANQUEEN and OnlyFansPimp187?