Don’t Be A Menace

I’ve come across a handful of great articles written mostly from the eyes of music venue employees.  They’re all full of useful information and pretty entertaining as well.  Here’s a quick recap of each:

A Band Behaving Badly - This was from knowthemusicbiz.com’s blog.  They had an Anne Landers-style advice column.  Here was the reader’s scenario:

• Bar and band reach verbal agreement for band to play 2 weekends in a row at the bar
• Band acts like a bunch of jerks on the first weekend
• Bar tells band not to bother coming back next weekend
• Band threatens to take bar to small claims court

That’s basically the whole story, but click on the link for a little more detail and read their advice.  Put yourself in Judge Wapner’s shoes.  Who’s side would you rule in favor of?

What I Learned Working at Music Venues - This was written by Cameron over at musicianwages.com.  He details about 5 different things that musicians should be mindful of when playing at a local club.

Top 39 Annoying Things Bands Do - This was linked by the above blog from Musician Wages.  It was posted by a St. Louis music venue, The Creepy Crawl.  It’s a pretty amusing list (complete with reader feedback!).  These dudes sound like they don’t take crap from anybody.  Well, I suppose they must have taken crap from somebody, or else they wouldn’t have compiled this list.

These articles are summed up by one common theme: don’t be an inconsiderate jerk.  I’ve worked in the sales or customer service areas within a few different industries (college admissions, food service, and credit cards along with CD/DVD manufacturing).  No matter how rude a customer would be to me, I always lived up to my companies’ standards of service.  However, if being treated rudely, I typically wouldn’t go above and beyond those minimum standards of service.  But to people who were kind, considerate, and respectful, I’d do anything I could to help them out, even if it was above and beyond the call of duty. 

That’s what you get for being friendly: a friend in the business who will do everything in their power to help you.