Warning: this is a long rant.
After getting screwed by a corporate client....I had to vent here to the other small studio owners.
Our months are usually scattered with bookings from honest, hard working bands.....most of the weekends get booked pretty quick with some other single day bookings here and there.
Last Friday I get a call from a local producer that wants to book the studio for 2 weeks straight, and he has to start on Tuesday. So we bumped a single day session further down the month, and gave that band 1/2 off. This would give him a 4 day block, have the weekend off (cause the studio is booked that weekend with another band), then return for a 10 day block.
It turns out the producer had been hired by an artist, that had been hired by an ad agency to write some songs for commercials for one fairly large fast food chain.
So the session was scheduled to start today, and my studio partner was going to engineer it, while this other guy was playing producer role, and the "artist" was going to write and play all the music.......They were supposed to start at noon.
So my partner shows up around 10:00 to set the place up.....some time goes by, and he eventually calls me to get the producers phone number when 2:00 rolled around.
The producer says something like "the session is off" ....He (producer) just found out this morning (apparently) that he isn't doing the session anymore, which obviously means neither is our studio. No one even bothered to call the studio, or the engineer. How F*CKED is that. Zero respect. Maybe it's cause we don't have a Neve console?
So the end result, is that we actually lost money because we bumped a session. And when ever that happens, I think it's only fair to either offer some free time, or cut the rate. And everyone involved (studio, engineer, producer) gets the shaft. Because this whole thing happened so fast (and a holiday weekend), and they "had to get it done ASAP" there was never a contract signed between the studio and the client. This would have happened today, when everyone showed up.
I guess you live and you learn. I'm sure this has happened to every studio. However, it still makes me bitter.
Anyone else have a lovely studio story they would like to share?