LiveMusicMachine touts itself as the future of booking; yet another widgified concept, aimed at assisting artists. The concept is simple, LiveMusicMachine creates an embeddable widget based on your band’s specific requirements, and allows anyone to make a booking offer. When the transaction is completed, LiveMusicMachine takes $10 from you and $10 from the promoter. However, I’m left wondering if there’s any real need for or benefit from LiveMusicMachine.

LiveMusicMachine is supposed to help bridge the artist-fan gap, and strengthen that relationship by allowing your fans to book you directly. If one fan can’t afford your guarantee, multiple fans can chip in to cover the cost, a novel idea, but providing for the cringeworthy prospect of dealing with a handful of difficult and potentially shadypromoters rather than one.

As a side note, the widget doesn’t offer the ability to price your band according to location, so your listed guarantee remains the same regardless of whether or not the show is in a town where you draw 50 kids or a town where you draw 500.

Additionally, fans don’t always make for the best promoters. As someone who’s played hundreds of DIY shows, I’ve heard every excuse in the book as to why no one showed up, or they can’t follow through with the contract, or a myriad of other ways that this promoter failed at their job. While there are great DIY promoters out there, thoroughly discussing an event directly with them is the best way to filter out who has their shit together and who doesn’t. I find the idea of a tool to expedite and mechanize the booking process to be rather off-putting.

I suppose the bottom line here is that booking is not something that can be responsibly done on a whim. LiveMusicMachine seems to have its heart in the right place, they offer the ability to process payments through a third party (GigPay), the widget is able to be slapped on the major social pages (Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube), and $10 a show isn’t really that significant of a price-tag, but the entire concept somewhat irresponsible. Furthermore everything that can be handled by LiveMusicMachine can be handled with a quick email, which leaves me wondering what the point is.

If you’ve used LiveMusicMachine, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Or if there’s some benefit that I’m overlooking, let me know! Anybody?