There is basically no fixed expense difference in the larger bands, at least at our scale. We rent the hall for the same amount of time for setup, have the same amount of sound equipment, etc.
Our dance, and most dances, pay per person instead of per band. I don’t entirely know where that is, though I do have some guesses? Mostly I think it’s that it feels like you’re paying someone to do work, and there’s an amount that feels fair to pay them regardless of how many other people are working alongside them?
If you switched from paying per person to paying per band, I think you would have a problem where musicians would form smaller bands even in cases where that meant the music was not as much fun to dance to. Because there is currently no negotiation on price (almost everywhere pays some fixed rate plus maybe a bonus as discussed in this post) it’s pretty hard for the organizers to encourage larger groups when that makes sense.
The main push towards smaller bands today is that organizers are more likely to book them, especially in cases where the smaller band is just as fun to dance to as a larger one. I do think passing through the economic pressures that make organizers want to book smaller bands is reasonable, but given the rest of how musicians are compensated it’s hard to do this in a way that doesn’t exaggerate the incentive.
It’s an interesting equilibrium for this—once everyone expects to be paid individually, it’ll be tough to switch to the “pay for entertainment sum” model that I understand is more common for small music venues (though the rates vary pretty widely, so it may have similar effects for larger groups).
At a very basic level, your revenue per attendee doesn’t change, so your ability to pay doesn’t scale with number of musicians. Since you probably shouldn’t buck the expectations of base pay per person, you likely need to set different bonus/incentive levels for different sizes of group, to take into account the assumption that bigger groups have more attendance (justifying their higher expense) as a baseline.
There is basically no fixed expense difference in the larger bands, at least at our scale. We rent the hall for the same amount of time for setup, have the same amount of sound equipment, etc.
Our dance, and most dances, pay per person instead of per band. I don’t entirely know where that is, though I do have some guesses? Mostly I think it’s that it feels like you’re paying someone to do work, and there’s an amount that feels fair to pay them regardless of how many other people are working alongside them?
If you switched from paying per person to paying per band, I think you would have a problem where musicians would form smaller bands even in cases where that meant the music was not as much fun to dance to. Because there is currently no negotiation on price (almost everywhere pays some fixed rate plus maybe a bonus as discussed in this post) it’s pretty hard for the organizers to encourage larger groups when that makes sense.
The main push towards smaller bands today is that organizers are more likely to book them, especially in cases where the smaller band is just as fun to dance to as a larger one. I do think passing through the economic pressures that make organizers want to book smaller bands is reasonable, but given the rest of how musicians are compensated it’s hard to do this in a way that doesn’t exaggerate the incentive.
It’s an interesting equilibrium for this—once everyone expects to be paid individually, it’ll be tough to switch to the “pay for entertainment sum” model that I understand is more common for small music venues (though the rates vary pretty widely, so it may have similar effects for larger groups).
At a very basic level, your revenue per attendee doesn’t change, so your ability to pay doesn’t scale with number of musicians. Since you probably shouldn’t buck the expectations of base pay per person, you likely need to set different bonus/incentive levels for different sizes of group, to take into account the assumption that bigger groups have more attendance (justifying their higher expense) as a baseline.