Inspirations and Demotivations

Work, work and work, what else is new?

Anyways, this week has been a horrendous struggle, trying to manage Tokyo Hardcore is proving to be such a huge challenge, it's time consuming, emotional and I'm getting insanely run down for little reward.  Basically I've hit pretty much breaking point with the business, since I'm feeling too powerless and less motivated with the business.  My understanding of fashion and the lolita community is never going to be anywhere near that of Susannah's and while both me and Susannah are in this together, the reality is I'm more or less going to go by her expertise and as such I'm losing motivation as I'm honestly feeling more and more out of control.  As such to remove myself from all the dramu and stress I'm probably going to play a day or twos role in support at most now with accounts, graphics and business analysis in terms of the stuff I do best.

In exchange, I'm focusing and moving all my work towards Neko Nation.  I'm aiming to put on a show a month at least, heck in May and July it's likely I'll be doing two shows in both those months depending on how all my plans go, with that said, June I'm taking a break plus around May, I'm expecting ANZ to start cutting my hours back significantly.

I've got an insanely busy month up ahead since I'm starting on the next massive project, the Neko Nation store.  If you've been into Tokyo Hardcore or saw our table at Neko Nation Brisbane you would have a bit of an idea what this involves.  However, this should be quite exciting since we're expanding massively and getting in lots of awesome stuff which I'm very excited about.

I've got a fair few other projects I'm working on as well although these are my main ones.

I'm hoping to work more with the Japanese community and try to actually give back where I can, I'm pretty happy I'm now in a position where I've had people asking me to help out and now that I'm intending to step back more from Tokyo Hardcore I will have time for this, the next one I've got lined up is the really fun Harajuku night happening in Chinatown hopefully this month.  Should be one epic night, I thought it was awesome enough that Adelaide had two crepe places and has an epic amount of cosplayers, geeks and anime fans per capita.

The other one is a bit of an interesting one, basically looking to trying to help out with the industrial scene.  I had an absolute blast last time I went out to an industrial night this year.  I actually miss the industrial scene a lot and there's always lots of awesome people I can really relate too and just have fun stomping the night away.  It's also an interesting thing because I would like to get to the point where I'm helping out by DJing but I don't really have the intention to put on events.  I miss being involved with events and helping out in a way that doesn't involve me having to manage a night.  Far from the end of Neko Nation, personally I would love to get out and expand into other areas and enter back an old familiar scene with new faces in a new city.  With that said, I wouldn't completely rule out ever putting on an industrial event.

Also looking forward to the getting the Neko Nation shop out there, since eventually down the line I get to fill another one of my projects I've wanted to do for a while.  ^^

Things are frustrating right now, very but things will eventually be healing up soon.  The latter half of the month has lots of good stuff happening to make up for it though.  ^^

Promoters - The False gods

I had a event promoter tell me that putting on events made them feel like a god, you got to make your own special creation that people worship.  They get excited about your event, they encourage others to get excited about it and hell they're willing to pay to attend your event.  Basically you're paid to throw parties, you get paid for it, you get popular and people love you, what's not to love!

It all gets to peoples heads at times in some sort of crazy god like syndrome which I've honestly seen many get too many promoters get carried away with, even the more famous and experienced promoters get too caught up into it at times.

After a while you can get into a position where you throw successful events and you think that every event you throw will demand worship and attendance but the reality is if you can't provide people won't be interested.  The Big Day Out was a perfect example of this, to pull of 20 years of festivals is an epic achievement and the recent line-up was considered sub-par and the worst seen in quite sometime.

Big Day Out made a huge mistake, in an age of social media where they had instant feedback from fans, saying that they weren't too happy with the direction they were going.  Big Day Out's response was that our line up was amazing and that people didn't give them enough credit for their line up choice in particular Kayne West, which they copped a lot of flack for.

This is one of the biggest problems I see in event promoting that people need reasons to go, that's why they're called promoters and they didn't give people good enough reasons to go and the picture on the right shows the end result in terms of the latest Big Day Out.  This is something that happens often with smaller event promoters, events need to be unique and different and need to get people excited about going to them, which I feel people seem to get a bit lazy with it worked last time.  Having a good name or track record definitely helps but at the end of the day people won't go to a bad event.

The other thing I've noticed is a need to be seen as invincible and that a show with few numbers is the worst thing in the world, ok, financially it is but promoters need to remember that it's better to put on a good show that few people attended, because at least they can tell their friends and grow the event, while the last thing I'd want to do is throw an event with lots of people which turns out to be really bad.  They think it's an insult to their promoting skills and their popularity, sometimes these things happen and it's good if you have a few hardcore fans out of an event, events don't need to be made for the masses but for massive enjoyment, if you're not doing this you shouldn't be putting on your own events.

I've noticed that people feel a need to cancel shows if the numbers are bad and to make up all sorts of excuses for their failures, that saying a "lack of numbers" is a sign of weakness or a bad event.  I honestly go against conventional wisdom and am happy to admit an event has poor numbers, an event has poor numbers and if I can't get a decent number of people I will lose money and can't afford to put that event on again.  By being honest with my crowd, people actually respect honesty and if it's a good idea people will encourage more of their friends to support the idea, they will actually tell me if I did something wrong or why people aren't interested, by being honest to my people, my people are honest to me, I can learn, improve and make bigger and better events in the future.

In comparison, I've seen all too often that promoters feel the need to make us excuses and my god it happens so much and they end up being such see through blatant lies.  This is not how you do things.  Promoters feel the need to cover up bad numbers and make up a reason to get out of putting on an event, it's horrible and disrespectful to the punters.  By giving people a reason, you've essentially telling people that your event is not worth going to because of a given reason, people lose respect for you to think that your event was all about one detail or factor, people won't tell you what went wrong, you won't learn how to improve.  Plus lets not forget, you're lying to your fans, you want people to trust that you're putting on a good event, how are people going to trust you if you've lied to them?

Overall these things need to stop, this is 2012, we are all connected through our Facebook's and event promoters have more tools than ever to get feedback for their events.  Promoters need to learn to see this as an advantage and treat this with respect and understand that people have their needs.  Feeling the need to feed to your god like worship is one thing but please remember, put you fans first, don't treat them like idiots and actually listen to them and give them what they want.

Onwards and Upwards

It's been a dramatic past few weeks but it looks like things are back on track, there's lots of ups and downs in business, my god the highs have been high and the lows have been low.  We've gone from the best month for Neko Nation with our most epic debut Neko Nation show which was our biggest one yet, to lots of stock problems which have been plaguing Tokyo Hardcore and giving us huge headaches.  Although to make up for the lack of stock, my god is the stock piling into Tokyo Hardcore over the next month.

It's been a case of how dangerous mixing business and pleasure can be, running a business with your partner in troubled times has put a strain onto us and has really tested us but we've survived and things are only looking up for now.

Both myself and Susannah have been planning out big plans across the next few months, which is exciting even though we've got some busy times ahead.  With Susannah scoring work with Pimp Pad, AV-Con and Luna Magazine all in the last month, she's going to be busy as hell, while on my end ANZ is demanding I'm in 5 nights in a row now, despite all the news in the media about job cuts.

It's a worrying time as I've been struggling to cope with my schedule, money has been very tight despite money coming in, I'm not really getting much in return.  I've been getting a chance to hang out and party more, it's not often and it's a tight squeeze but at least it's happening for once, in particular it was a lot of fun to hang out with the AV-Con people, it's nice to hang out with lots of busy people who kind of understand the sort of lives that we lead.

I'm also starting to realise how awesome a lot of people in my life are.  A lot of people have been supporting what both myself and Susannah have been doing, it's great to see that people are continuing to support something very different and unique in Adelaide and all of Australia.  I've met a lot of awesome people who have helped out with our shows and taken an interest in our clothes and our work has lead to meet so many people I've looked up to for a while and also lots of really awesome new people.

More importantly, I probably seriously never stress how much Susannah actually does for me, we rely on each other so much to get through life.  We work long days and nights, rarely get breaks, get very little reward for our work and the only thing that really gets us through the tough times and in our best times we have such amazing times and fun together.  I'm looking back at all the crazy adventures over the past year and it's just nuts to think we're working in our own store and throwing parties all around the country and having lots of fun in the process.  I still can't get over how pretty she is and how amazing she has made my life, I honestly never thought I would ever meet anyone like her and anyone that came close would have no interest in me but I'm glad that I'm still with someone well beyond my dreams and now that we've survived some terrible times together I'm looking forward to lots of amazing times together soon.  ^^