Anyone go to this? Good turnout?
yes, and it was a good turnout of about 30. Xiongmao events are just plagued with issues. It’s come to the point where the brand is permanently tarnished. There were sound issues until about midnight and even then the sound wasn’t good. It was a cold rainy night and there were no rides arranged to get people home from the remote location. It’s sad and I’m hoping to see improvement.
We had major issues even putting this show on. 10 days before the event we had no venue. We approached Fanmate and asked to host the event there. At that point it was go with Fanmate or cancel the party. Originally we were meant to have access on Wednesday but they had a large event on Wednesday and Thursday and it ended up Friday afternoon by the time we got in there*. We had to move all our equipment over from the kuixinglou venue then get it set up. Both our normal sound engineers weren’t available so we got a friend to help out setting up the sound on Friday night. After issues with one of the amps early on Saturday night, we pretty much had to beg him to leave his sisters birthday party to come over and help us out. He did what he could but the sound still wasn’t right. It’s really unusual for us to have bad sound at a Xiong Mao night. We will make sure it’s a one-off.
With regards to the transport from the venue, we did ask some sanlunche’s to be present at the entrance from midnight onwards. I’m guessing they didn’t show, I only found out when I tried to get home at 6.30am. What I was expecting to find at that time of night/day, I don’t know… Again, this is something we’ll need to fix before the next event.
All together we sold about 70 tickets. Less than half of what we expected. It was a weird crowd as half of the people came early and left early with the other half arriving about 2am. Approximately 20 people got a taxi out there then left without coming in as they weren’t willing to pay 50rmb for the ticket. We tried to throw in a free drink and lowering the ticket price later on but some people were still not interested. This is a huge problem at events where tickets are involved. The costs for bringing 2 international DJs plus 1 DJ from Beijing to Chengdu are quite high. It’s almost impossible to do without having tickets. A lot of people lose interest the moment they see there is a door fee.
Enough excuses…we can’t really argue with any of your complaints. We’re aware it wasn’t good enough and will try our hardest to improve before the next event. We’ll also make sure you get a free ticket for our next party.
* I should point out that everybody we’ve dealt with at Fanmate have been friendly and very helpful. This isn’t a dig at them, they were really apologetic about us not getting early access.