What a venue partner gets

A venue partnership only works if both sides can say plainly what they are putting in. Vague partnerships fail at the second show, usually over who was supposed to be paying the sound engineer. So here is the division of labour, written down.

What the Guild brings

• Verified artists. Every act on a Guild bill has been vetted: the booking team knows their draw, their genre, their lineup size and whether they turn up. A venue taking a Guild night is not gambling on an unknown.
• An audience that is already assembled. Guild members attend free and attend habitually. A partner room starts every Guild night with a base of people who came because it is a Guild show, before a single public ticket is sold.
• Marketing. Design, listings, paid and organic social, the newsletter, presale to the membership, and press outreach. The venue is named and linked on every piece.
• A settled bill. Artists are paid by the Guild under a Guild contract. The venue does not negotiate guarantees, chase invoices, or arbitrate a door dispute at one in the morning.
• Consistency. A recurring series in the calendar, themed by genre, with the same production standard every time.

What the venue brings

• The room on an agreed date, with an agreed curfew and an agreed capacity.
• The bar and the staff to run it. Bar revenue is where most rooms make their money on a live night, and the Guild's job is to fill the room in front of it.
• Production — house sound and lighting where the room has it, or access for the Guild to bring its own where it does not.
• Door and security staffing, or an agreement about who supplies it.
• Licensing and insurance for the premises, which is the venue's in every arrangement.

The three deal structures

Numbers are negotiated room by room and are not published, because a deal that suits a 60-seat listening room is meaningless in a 400-capacity outdoor space. The structures, though, are always one of three.

Room rental

The Guild pays a flat fee for the room and keeps the door. Simple, predictable, and the venue carries no exposure to ticket sales — it keeps the bar and knows its number before anyone arrives. It suits rooms that are confident about their bar take and would rather not bet on whether a band draws.

Door split

Ticket revenue is divided by an agreed percentage, usually after production costs are covered. Both parties are exposed to the same outcome, which is the fairest arrangement and also the one requiring the most trust: both sides need to agree in advance what counts as a production cost and who is counting the door.

Bar percentage

The venue takes no room fee and no share of the door, and instead pays the Guild a percentage of bar sales across the night. This is the right structure for a room whose economics are entirely about drinks, and it aligns the two parties tightly: the Guild is rewarded for filling the room with people who stay, not merely for selling tickets to people who leave after the headliner's third song.

Whichever structure is used, the artist guarantee is fixed and paid by the Guild. It is never the residual line that absorbs a quiet night.

What a venue should ask before signing

These are the questions the Guild would rather be asked early than late.

• What is the realistic draw for this bill in this room, and what is that estimate based on?
• Who is running sound, and who is paying them?
• Who staffs the door and holds the float?
• What is the settlement process, and when does it happen — that night, or by invoice within a stated number of days?
• Filming: the Guild records its shows, so where do cameras go and what does the room need to know?
• What happens if an act cancels? The Guild replaces them; the date holds.

The longer-term arrangement

Venue partners take a listed profile on the Guild site with a booking contact, appear on every show they host, and get access to the verified artist roster for their own bookings on nights the Guild is not there. Guild members are given a reason to be in the room on ordinary nights too — a member benefit at the bar, or preferential access to the space — because a partnership that only exists twice a month is a rental agreement with better branding.

Rooms interested in hosting can start at the venue partner page. The first conversation is about the room and the calendar, not about the split.