Lynn From PVRIS Responds to VIP Package Criticism • Page 4

I have no desire to meet my favourite bands. But that's just me. I'm not a star struck type. I get more of a kick seeing the NBA larry obrien trophy. I would pay extras to see soundcheck rather than meet a band though

 

This right here

 

Also, I understand sometimes boasting about a good deed is no deed at all.
But the band could also realise that if they were more l transparent about the charities they may be donating to also makes their fans aware of what charities they find worthwhile and said fans may also end up giving a little of their own hard earned or awareness to this cause

 

I think you are a) drawing the right conclusions from the wrong premises and b) underestimating just how difficult it is to make a living playing music.

I'm sure other people can touch on b), but as far as a) goes:

where is this idea coming from that artists /should/ care about their fans? if PVRIS or whatever would not have gone out of their way to interact with their fans unless they were getting compensated for their time (in which case the compensation would have been the motivator, not the interaction), why does this make them bad or insincere? i hear of this a lot, and i think it's terrible. there is a line between being grateful that someone has supported your art and desiring connection with every person that has supported your art. art is not a window into a person. when you go up to someone who made a song that changed your life and express it to them, expecting it to be a moment of connection rather than you releasing an internalization - you are blurring the line between two separate things and projecting your imagination onto a person you don't know.

for a person who admire another person's art enough and project that admiration onto the artist deeply enough to want to pay lots of money to meet them, the expectation for genuine connection is misguided and completely unfair to the artist. giving your emotional energy to a stranger is exhausting - sincerely expecting that people who just happened to write affecting songs should want to do this or that idealized interactions with strangers should be moments of connection shows a level of entitlement that i don't think people realize. if anything, high meet & greet prices are far more transparent in that the person buying it knows that they're trading their money for an artist's emotional labor.

 

This is a good post (from the guy w/ probably the smallest ratio of minutes of recorded music to lives saved - joking, obviously) that everyone should read:

Any tips for talking to you at your book signing...

"Otherwise, here is a thing I want to say: I know and I get that meeting somebody who’s made a thing that is useful or moving is a little weird, because the time we spend with music or literature or dance or film is private, intimate: if I listen to a song, and I have a very strong emotional response to it, it’s like the song knowsme, sort of – the song was there was I was most vulnerable. In some cases, it saved my life, and that’s no exaggeration. What intimacy could be more profound?

But of course that’s illusory. The song has no feelings of its own, and the songwriter – say, Joni Mitchell – was not there with me while I was sitting in a dark room sobbing to “A Case of You,” feeling like it spoke directly to me, so desperately in love, needing words to understand what I felt. The songwriter is really exactly like the person who made a coat: without the coat, some days I’d be so cold I wouldn’t be able to even think about anything else! My debt to the coat is considerable! But I would not be nervous meeting the person who made the coat, no matter how long I’ve been using it or how vital it’s been to me.

So, nobody should be nervous to say hi to me in a signing line. I am really not anybody special at all.* I know songs are different from coats, but the above analogy really holds. I hope I’m an ok person, but I also know that sometimes we talk about people we admire in these superlatives that start out funny (“Joni Mitchell is a PERFECT HUMAN BEING. She is GOD ALMIGHTY WALKING THIS EARTH.” I talk this way about JM all the time, btw) and then have the result of 1) repeatedly expressing an obvious untruth, which is the exact method for inculcating a belief and 2) making us nervous to meet people who’ve made things we like. But there’s nothing to be nervous about. I’m just the guy who made the thing. The thing itself can’t be met, or has already been met.

*really honestly really. It would make me super happy, super happy like a Yoshi at the Super Happy Tree, if people would join me in this accurate perception of me being a person who makes things he hopes are useful to others."

 

would like to extend the analogy and say that Craig's argument is reminiscent of the following uh, trash which I apologize for, written at 2 or 3am while very very high:

your life has been made much better by a coat, and you wish to give thanks to your humble coatmaker. you are joined intermittently at a crossroads by fellow humans - about a hundred at any given time - and as you all wait in the cold together, you each share the reasons that compelled you to this place.

a common thread ultimately arises - all of your lives have been made remarkably better by your coats, which were all made by the same pair of hands, that of the eminent coatmaker. you have come to thank him! wonderfully, you are merely today's group. the coatmaker's coats have changed so deeply the lives of so many people, that every day a new group of humans appear where you are presently, anxious and waiting to meet their extraordinary coatmaker.

the coatmaker is stealthily peering at you all through a small hole in his curtains. it wasn't like this in the lo-fi days, he recalls. as gladly as he would interact with any wearer of a coat of his and receive their thanks and perhaps chat with them about their favorite sports teams, the sheer number of humans who now wish to meet him on a solar daily basis has become quite overwhelming for him. he's always been an introvert, after all, even remaining so through those finicky middle years, and he still doesn't quite understand why these lovely humans come in such droves to thank him for his coats. (or even more perplexingly, on occasion to inquire about the model number of the stampers used to make the first three generations of buttons.) after all, he's only the person who makes the coats!

as time passes, he begins to consider walking around in an opaque space suit and limiting his interaction with these grateful coat-donning humans from a far distance, preferably slightly preceding the Rayleigh criterion, and in arbitrarily large groups.

but one half-morning, the idea came to him like a coat. the problem was chiefly the quantity, and the effort each one required. he estimated that he could cheerfully interact with about ten humans a day before the desire to drape a coat tightly over his eyes and use its tails to shield his poor ears from sound forever began to actualize. and if these humans wanted to meet him so badly, well, perhaps it could be a good thing. ever since O. Wer Elmde had monopolized the sugar-coating industry in 1582a, he had been left with only his arduous coat display runs to make a living off of, and money was always tight. ah yes, he would be like his coats! on sale just like them, but perhaps with a nonzero margin. he would faithfully sell pockets of time to ten of these humans each day, and those ten humans he would gladly interact with, receive thanks from, and chat with about favorite sports teams, all while preserving the few remaining strands of his sanity (most of them scattered away that fateful night). he was free now, to bask in the inevitably momentary satisfaction of having creatively engineered yet another coat, and to finally catch up on those new Coatrus.fm threads.

*logs on*

 

So they increased their VIP price for charity? Does this mean they still keep their baseline VIP price from last tour and throw the extra charity donation on top, which makes it more expensive? Maybe I'm old school, but I'd consider charity keeping their old prices and still donating some.

 

we the kings was selling $50 dollar meet and greets at the show in a 400 cap where it was very easy to do so
how hard is it to just come out and hang around for a bit like most bands that play that venue do???

 

What a weird thing for people to get worked up about.

 

Waiting around to meet bands after a show feels a little stalker-ish to me so I'm definitely more on board with the paid m&g (but only for my favorites and only if its a reasonable amount of money)

 

Holy shit, I owe you a beer. Thank you so much! Been looking for these for months.

 

LIKE HELL SHE WASN'T

 

Sorry I'm hurt now

 

I feel like my story went slightly under appreciated and I feel hurt now

let's be hurt together

 

i don't buy vip i meet the band/artist before of after the show if i can wait or sometimes i get free vip
edit like Sunday a bunch of us waited like 40 something i guess maybe a bit more or less all waited 85 mins for Andrew McMahon to come out and he took pics with everyone outside toads place

 

i saw waterparks in ct last month and after show they met fans chatted n everything inside the venue not even at the merch table for free. It was on the stage n on the floor near the stage lol. i wish more artists were like this

 

Most of these VIP packages come with other items, not just meet and greets. You're not necessarily just paying to meet the band. A lot of bands still do come out after the show and meet fans. State Champs' tour in 2015 had a VIP package, but Derek still came to their merch table after the show and met fans.

Not to mention, this is their job. A lot don't make much money doing it. They don't get healthcare. This is one of the few ways bands can actually make money to keep doing what they do.

 

Was waiting for the TLDR version. Was 3-4 of the longest posts I've ever seen