Australia's venues rent the buildings their whole scene depends on. Your business sits on someone else's ground too.
In Australia, nearly every small music venue sits in a building someone else owns. As long as the rent stays manageable, nobody notices. The moment the lease ends or the price jumps, the venue is gone. The audience was still there. The room wasn't. I see the same story, on a smaller scale, with almost every freelancer I help.
What is happening in Australia
Hypebot reports on Australian live music: the small rooms the local scene runs on are almost all in rented premises. The landlord doesn't renew, or renews at a rent no ticket price can carry. Then the door closes.
The article points to voices calling for the sector to own those buildings itself. That is a slow and expensive route. It is also the only one that deals with the root of it: if you don't own the room, you don't decide your own future.
The same story, only smaller
Swap "building" for "platform" and you have the situation of most self-employed people I work with.
- Your customers live in a booking site's address book, not in yours.
- Your portfolio sits on a social network that can change its rules tomorrow.
- Your website runs at an agency with a monthly fee and a password you don't hold.
- Your quotes, calendar and invoices live in tools someone else owns.
As long as the bill stays affordable, you never think about it. You notice it when the price goes up, the commission rises or an account gets locked. That is exactly the moment when you have no time to sort it out calmly.
Do the maths for yourself
Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns.
Left: what you pay every month for everything that isn't yours. Subscriptions, hosting, plugins, commission per booking, the hours of whoever handles your website or your marketing. Add it up and multiply by twelve. Almost nobody has ever done that sum.
Right: what it costs you if it disappears tomorrow. How much of your income comes through that one channel? How many evenings would you spend collecting your customers again? Which files would simply be gone?
The questions people type about this are always the same: what a website costs to build, what website maintenance costs per year, what outsourcing your marketing costs. The amounts differ per trade, so fill in your own numbers. Only when both columns are on paper can you decide something instead of guessing at it.
Building your own customer list without a platform
A venue can almost never buy its building. You can take your customer list back, and it mostly costs you dull work.
- Export the names, email addresses and phone numbers of your customers into a file that sits on your own computer.
- Put your domain name in your own name, with a password you control.
- Make sure your work also lives on your own site, not only on the platform or the social network.
- Keep your quotes and invoices somewhere you can reach without a subscription.
This is not a fight against platforms. I use them myself for clients where they work. The difference is that a platform then becomes a channel and not a foundation.
What you can do with this tomorrow
Start small. Put twenty minutes in your diary tonight and do one thing: export your customer list and email it to yourself. That is the cheapest insurance you have.
Then the maths. Give it an hour, fill in both columns and look at what is there. If the left column runs higher than you expected, you know where to cut first. If the right column runs high, you know what to bring in-house first.
If you would rather not do that work yourself, that is what I am here for. For 35 euros a month I keep track of things like this, cancellable monthly. And if your own sum shows it wouldn't help you, I say so before you pay. Sometimes my answer is: don't.
The Australian venues found out how dependent they were when the lease ran out. You have the advantage of being able to count now, while the door is still open.
Frequently asked questions
All my work comes through a booking platform. Should I stop using it?
No. Stopping without an alternative costs you income. First make sure you hold your customers' contact details yourself and that people can also find you directly. Then do the sum: what do you pay in commission per year, and what would you keep from direct clients? Once that outcome is clear, you can wind down without a hole in your calendar.
What should I take into my own hands first?
Your customer list. Names, email addresses and phone numbers in a file that belongs to you. Then your domain name, registered under your own name. Those two together mean a platform change or a price rise doesn't send you back to the start.
What does maintaining your own website cost per year?
That depends on what you put on it. Count at least your domain name, hosting, updates and the hours of whoever keeps it current. For every item, ask who holds the passwords. A site that looks cheap but that you can't get into yourself is more expensive than the invoice suggests.
