Herdecke is a small town on the river Ruhr in North Rhine-Westphalia, between Dortmund and Hagen. Live music has happened here for years. We are in the middle of turning that into a proper non-profit promoter — and this page tells you exactly what we can and cannot offer you today.
Two columns, because the difference matters more than either column on its own.
Six lines and one link is plenty. The two items people forget are the ones we actually need for German paperwork — so they are marked.
In Germany the promoter has reporting duties that depend on who is paid and in what legal form. Individuals and partnerships are treated differently from companies, and payments through an agency differently again. It is not a trust question — it decides which form we have to file. Telling us up front saves an email later.
And the hat stays outside all of it: money the audience gives you directly is your income from third parties. It is not in our books and not in any filing we make.
Supporting young musicians and bands is written into the association's purpose, not a side project.
If you are starting out — in a school band, a bedroom project, a duo that has only ever played to friends — you are exactly who this association is for. We can offer a conversation before a first gig, help with sound and set list, a rehearsal slot where one exists, an introduction to a room that will give you a night, and a first audience that is on your side. Tell us what you do and what you are missing. You do not need a press kit.
This surprises visiting acts more than anything else, so here it is in advance.
In Germany the promoter — not the act — has to report to GEMA, the collecting society, which musical works were performed. That report is per event and needs, for each piece: the title and the composer's surname. Both are mandatory fields. A filing without composer surnames does not go through.
This applies to covers and to your own material alike. If you write your own songs, you are the composer and the filing is what routes the royalties to you — so it is worth ten minutes of your evening.
What we will ask for, ideally before you leave:
A photograph of a handwritten list is fine. What is not fine is nothing at all: from our own archive we know there are past nights where no set list was ever filed, and that is money that went nowhere. We would rather not add to that.
We would rather undersell this than oversell it.
This is not a concert hall circuit. Expect a room where the front row is a metre away and you can hear the back of the room breathing. Small line-ups work best. Larger bands have historically run into space and volume limits — we will tell you honestly rather than let you discover it at load-in.
The association is deliberately not tied to one room: bar room, hall, courtyard, church, outdoors. Which means stage, power and sound differ per date and we confirm them per date. Ask, and we will describe the actual room rather than a generic spec sheet.
Herdecke sits between Dortmund and Hagen in the Ruhr area — an easy detour if you are already routing through western Germany, and an awkward one if you are not. We would rather you slot us into an existing route than build a day around us.
We cannot book you today. We can put you on a list that a real promoter will work through, and we can tell you the truth about the terms while they are still being decided.