(our small resistance to money grabbing institutions)
Nothing essential for your Left of the Dial experience, but someone pointed out that any form of anarchy, however small, is always worth sharing, so here we go:
One thing that has always really bothered us is banking fees. If we want to pay an invoice from a foreign country, such as the UK for example, it costs about €20.
We understand that one has to pay for a service, but it’s not as if someone from the bank gets on a boat to London to deliver an envelope with our money. It’s all basically nothing more than communicating computers, so why is there such a ridiculously high fee?
It probably has something to do with the salaries of senior bank managers. They make hundreds of thousands, or even millions, a year.
That’s another thing that bothers us. We firmly believe that the world would be a much better place if money was distributed more evenly.
That’s why we've made it a point to try to spend less on banks.
As a festival and as a venue, we book hundreds of foreign bands every year, and almost all of them need to be paid via bank transfer. The agencies that represent these bands have the habit of splitting the fees into two equal amounts: a few weeks before the show you pay a 'deposit', and immediately after the show you transfer the remaining amount.
With a regular club show, that remaining amount sometimes changes because, for example, more tickets have been sold than initially estimated. But much more often it’s simply a fixed fee and you end up transferring the same amount twice.
Which means you have to pay a transfer fee twice.
We’ve started explaining to artists that they should just send one invoice for the total fee. We’re a trusting bunch, and we’re happy to transfer the full amount as soon as they send the invoice, even if it’s months before the show. And if we book multiple artists through one agency, we’ll try to pay everything in a single transfer.
For a bank employee with a top salary, it’s less than peanuts, but we managed to save about €4,000 in bank costs last year.
And that money was spent entirely on our festival.
We know, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't amount to much — but you have to start somewhere if you want to make the world a better place.
Big love,
The Robin Hoods of Left of the Dial