Festival Wants Bands To Perform For “Exposure”, Later Apologises

GTFO, Says Local Band

Having top-notch entertainment perform at your event doesn’t come cheap — booking a diva like Mariah Carey will cost you at least $1 million.

So what’s a local event company to do? Go local, of course.

And we don’t mean hiring big names in the local pop scene like Charlie Lim. We mean calling on the handful of smaller pop bands trying to make it big in the music industry.

After all, since they aren’t that successful, surely they’ll take any chance to perform, right?

Wrong! That’s what local event company Get Out! found out this week after they tried to approach an indie-pop band to perform at an event on Sentosa next month.

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Their promise of greater exposure rubbed the band, Astronauts, the wrong way. Mr Benjamin Mah, the band’s bassist, took to Facebook to air his grievances, calling out the company for its “poor planning”.

In a nutshell, Mr Mah’s issues with Get Out! are:

• Its limited budget for entertainment. To Mr Mah, this “devalues art/entertainment on the whole and specifically hurts the coming generations of aspiring talent”.
• Its lack of respect for performers. “Collaborations should be mutually beneficial/respectful, but you talk down as if you’re doing us a favour and failed to justify how anything you’ve offered is really beneficial,” said Mr Mah.
• Its poor planning. The email to bands was allegedly sent just 2 weeks before the event.

Get Out! responds

Responding to MS News‘ queries, Get Out! events said that it was deeply apologetic for the email to bands.

Its head, Mr Felix Sim added,

Our intent was never to insult musicians who are pursuing their passion and we admit that our outreach email (which I approved) could have been drafted in a more sensitive manner.

He also claimed that the firm had always been open to negotiations, but that this wasn’t communicated in the email.

Mr Sim continued,

We understand if Ben and his fellow musicians feel pissed off by our approach and for that we sincerely apologise.

Mr Sim also apologised to Benjamin on Facebook.

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Just how much is enough?

MS News has reached out to Benjamin to find out how much he thought would be a fair price for Astronauts to play at Get Out!’s event.

Check out the band’s jazzy, almost Winehouse-like tunes here:

 Featured image from GTFO SG’s Facebook and Benjamin Mah’s Facebook.