the_taste_of_cigarettes said

[orig][quote]

You won't get through to your friend, Martins, because in this scenario, for him, this is a sweet deal. The bands do all the work, cover the cost of the show, and he just shows up and rocks.

Pay-To-Play is ethically wrong because it makes the workers pay to work. Any other job that did that would receive such a high level of protest that no one would ever get it to come together, but because performing music comes with a "rush", because it provides "creative fufillment", and because most musicians are used to losing out in the end, they somehow legitimize greedy behavior by actually giving someone money so they can get a job.

Imagine being a chef that had to pay the restaurant every time he cooked a meal? And couldn't recoup on his overhead? That wouldn't last long, I tells ya.

At this point in time, there is so much exploitation and downfall in the music industry that I don't even know where to begin. It's a million fish in a pond big enough for a hundred. A ratio such as this will always put ideas, schemes, plans in the minds of people looking to rip other people off. It can't go back to the "old days" where there was 6 bands in a 100 mile radius so you the odds were in the bands' favor.