Should I Take That Gig?

Negotiating is only fun for certain people, of which I am not one. But whenever I’m asked to perform, musically or otherwise, I need to decide if and under what circumstances I want to accept.

 I did write a bit about this in my infamous blog post about playing with Amanda Palmer, so here’s a bit more: when I negotiate various offers, my interior dialog/checklist goes something like this (read more in detail about each point after the cut):

  1. What are the reasons, if any, I want to do this gig?

  2. If primarily for pay, what amount is sufficient for my efforts?

  3. If primarily for a non-monetary reason, am I clear what the effort cost to me is and am I willing to donate the relative time/financial difference between that and what, if anything, I will be paid?

  4.  Is there something other than money I can request as compensation?

  5.  Am I clear what the finances of the event are, so that I can be clear I’m not the only event supplier donating my time? (e.g., if they are paying a caterer and venue rental, they don’t get a discount from me)

  6. Am I comfortable that the person who wants my participation knows what they are doing, has the authority to do it, and has realistic expectations for the event and me?

  7. If the request is from someone I know personally, will anything about the above (esp. 5 & 6) or about our relationship make it difficult for me to have a proper business relationship with them, so I should just say I’m not available?

  8. Am I prepared to turn down a “better” offer if one arrives after accepting this one?

Read more about each point:  Continue reading

What’s That Event?

When you create an event on Facebook, presumably you

  1. Want people to pay attention and attend, plus
  2. Want others to know that their friends are attending so they might consider it as well.

But failing to title your event in a specific way may sabotage its visibility!

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Mailing List Management

It happened again this week: an event producer to whom I had given my email address sent out an announcement of their next event. But instead of using a mailing list management tool they copied and pasted all 100-odd mailing list addresses… into the TO: field of their Gmail message rather than BCC:. So I and every other person on their mailing list now have those 100-odd addresses in our email client!

Asided from having to scroll through them to reach the actual message, why is this anything other than mildly annoying?

– If anyone who received the message hits “reply all” (and may do that by default) can all end up in a looping flamewar as others reply all “Stop sending!” “Take me off this list!!” etc.

– All recipients whose inbox resides on their computer (i.e., they don’t only ever access email via a web browser) now have all of our addresses on their hard drive… which means if any of them get a computer virus that looks for email addresses to “harvest” (most viruses do not want to destroy your computer, but to take it over and use your data and internet connection to spam others) we all get even more spam as our addresses are added to lists for sale to spammers.

It’s particularly easy to forget to use BCC when using a Gmail account because the default Compose window now doesn’t give you a BCC field by default – you must click on a small link to open it. The event people use Gmail and did successfully use BCC previously.

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