La Violette Società
In March 2016 we shattered the tired gig formula with a concept both elegantly simple and quietly revolutionary: an event series with no headliners, where every artist receives equal billing, equal stage time and an equal cut of the profits.
There's something so perfectly late-capitalist about the standard live music format - that tiered hierarchy where the headliner gets the lion's share while opening acts scramble for scraps of attention from an audience that's mostly just killing time. It's a system we've all accepted with the resignation of people who can't imagine any alternative.
By randomising the running order and mixing media forms - music alongside spoken word alongside visual art—we created something that feels less like a standard gig and more like a small temporary utopia. Audiences arrived for one act and left raving about another, discovering new obsessions they never would have encountered in the traditional system where the unknowns play to empty rooms.
The equal profit-sharing felt like a quiet revolution in an industry where even moderately successful artists struggle to pay the rent. It acknowledges the uncomfortable truth that success in creative fields is arbitrary, having as much to do with privilege and dumb luck as with talent or work ethic.
I kept thinking about how many brilliant artists I've missed because they were relegated to the 7pm slot, playing to a half-empty room of people checking their phones. How many conversations never happened because venues cleared out after the headliner. How many alliances never materialised because the hierarchy kept artists separated.
In its quiet way, this equal-billing concept might be the most punk thing I'd encountered in years - not in its aesthetics or posturing, but in its genuine challenge to the power structures that govern creative expression. It reminds us that another world is possible, not in some distant utopian future, but right now, in any venue willing to try something different.
- Matt Lockett, Violette Records 2018