OUR STRUGGLES WITH THE MODERN WORLD

Short version:

If you go to Bandcamp.com and look for ‘leftofthedialfestival’ you’ll find an overview of all Bandcamp accounts of artist that have played or will play Left of the Dial.

Very (very) long version:

Lately, we’ve started to feel more and more uncomfortable using Spotify as a tool to promote the Left of the Dial lineup. Lots of people use Spotify and it’s an easy way to reach a lot of people, but we can’t help but feel that we’re pointing our ticketholders to a platform that’s basically ripping off artists by paying them roughly €0.004 per stream, while the founder of Spotify has an estimated net worth of $4.8 billion.

We fully understand that companies need money to set up a service. It’s pretty much the same with Left of the Dial, we can’t give ALL the money from ticket sales directly to the artists, we also have to pay for a lot of other stuff (and people!) to make the festival happen.

We do try however to spend the money you spend on tickets wisely, and we really make an effort to NOT buy products or services from questionable multinationals.

Which, in all honesty, is close to impossible. Just look at which platform you’re reading this on. We may not have spent any money on this post, but we all know very well that everybody’s paying with their data when using social media.

But back to the music.

We felt that Bandcamp has a much fairer business model for artists, so we wanted to set up an account that would link directly to the artists. Divided in neat different categories, in chronological order of the Left of the Dial editions. Not to make any money of course, purely for promotional reasons.

It turned out to be impossible. So, what we created a fan-account, and we followed every artist who ever played Left of the Dial. Or at least, every artist we could find. We started at 2018, and worked our way back to the current lineup.  We may have missed someone, and when we’ll add them now, they will appear on top of the list, which will make it very confusing, but hey, we’re doing the best we can.

To cut a long story short, we hope you go to Bandcamp and support the Left of the Dial artists. Bandcamp’s share is only 15% on digital items, so if you spend a couple of euros on some tracks today, you’re basically buying your favourite artist a beer tonight.

Big love,

The strugglers of Left of the Dial

PS: Don’t worry Spotify lovers, despite us being a bit on the fence about the whole platform, we’ll still keep on adding new tracks to all our Spotify playlists!

SOMETIMES WE MESS THINGS UP

(and then we try to make them right)

Overall, things went pretty smoothly last year. Except for one thing. We had to cancel the second show of a band through absolutely no fault of their own, but in retrospect,  we feel we didn’t make that quite clear.

During the second show’s soundcheck, we got a noise complaint from a neighbouring office. The office was supposed to be empty, but apparently someone was working late, who got absolutely livid and threatened to call the police if we made any sound before 18.00h.

Now, we’re not afraid of the police, and we only use that specific stage for one weekend, but the venue is there all year round. We didn’t want to jeopardize their much-needed good relationship with their neighbours. So, we had no other choice than to skip the first two bands.

For one band, we could easily find another slot, but the other had to leave straight after their scheduled show due to other obligations which made it impossible to move them to another slot.

Of course, it’s a festival and these things happen, but we could have communicated it waaaayyyyy better.

In the heat of the moment, with hundreds of other things going on, we gave you some vague ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’ reason which maybe made it sound like the band had some part in the cancelation while they absolutely didn’t.

They really wanted to play their second show and judging from the queue at their first show and all your disappointed reactions you would have REALLY loved to see them again.

So, we did the only logical thing – we invited them back for Left of the Dial 2025. And they accepted!

They will be part of the Feb 40 which we’ll proudly announce tomorrow.

Big love,

The stage divers of Left of the Dial

PS: Most of you will know exactly which band we’re talking about, but we promised to keep it a secret until the first official lineup announcement, so if all you smartasses can restrain yourself from posting their name in the comments for about 24 hours, that would be greatly appreciated. Tomorrow it’ll be official and we can all publicly celebrate their return!

UPS AND DOWNS

 So far, it has been a week with some ups and downs. 

By chance, we discovered that our ticket shop hadn’t been working properly for days. Most of you already got your tickets, so you rightfully couldn't care less, but we felt pretty lousy about disappointing the people who finally decided to join us this year.

And if we may say so ourselves, you really don’t want to miss out on Left of the Dial this year. Of course we’ll have the immense popular good old Band on a Boat, but our love of alliteration also made us want to do something else. 

And today we got one step closer to Bands on a Bus.

We spent weeks trying to find a bus company willing to drive around the city with a band playing on board. Today, we finally struck gold. Somewhere in the south, we found a parking lot filled with party busses and their owner loved the idea of Bands on a Bus. 

We still have to figure out some technical stuff, find a band who doesn’t get car sick and somehow make sure everyone will be safe while cruising the city, so we’re not there yet, but things are looking great. We might even say it has been the highlight of the week and we can only hope Bands on a Bus will also be one of the highlights of the festival. 

To let you in on our excitement, we made some phone videos which we'll post later on. A bit crappy, but hopefully you’ll get the general idea…

Big love,

The moody bus drivers of Left of the Dial

(Oh, and about the ticket shop: it’s more or less fixed, so ticketless people can queue up again. It’s mostly a pretty up week after all!)