Alright, really it shouldn't be "return", 'pay to play' schemes have been around forever. For those of you in the know, a P2P arrangement is where an artist pays a venue or promoter to book a gig, hopefully recouping that payment through ticket sales/door fee. Normally this is done without any money changing hands at first, but the artist doesn't get any cash until the chosen amount of tickets have been sold, and in the case of not enough tickets being sold, the artist has to pay the venue the difference.
This was a very popular method used by smaller venues to lure uninformed artists to play their joints. In the 1990s and early noughties, p2p largely disappeared to be replaced by what I currently call the "free" gig. Although the artist will never have to pay out of pocket to play, many venues require the artist to bring a sufficient crowd to warrant being paid for a gig. I'm not entirely against this, although I do think there are some promoters out there who make good coin on the backs of artists who aren't savvy enough to book their own paying gigs. I have played many gigs in Ottawa and London where the pay was conditional on how big a crowd I managed to get out. In the case of unknown artists, like myself, I think this is probably an appropriate way of doing business, as my customer (the venue) doesn't pay me until I have rendered the service (of providing paying patrons to their establishment). Once you become a known act, and essentially guarantee a good night for the venue, then these types of arrangements become moot, although by that time you will probably have a manager or label looking after these things for you.
However there has been an increasingly worrying trend, particularly in the large festival market, of using Sonicbids as the only method of booking gigs. Sonicbids acts like an application service. A band signs up for a fee and they get to host an electronic press kit on the site. Then when they want to try and get a gig at say North by Northeast or other large North American festivals (Ottawa's Bluesfest, Montreal's PopMontreal, etc.) the artist has to pay another fee to "apply" to get a gig. In my understanding, both Sonicbids, and the festival themselves get a cut of this fee (which can range anywhere from $5 USD to $40). Essentially the artist is paying for a chance to get a slot at one of these shows. To me this is even a worse situation for the artist than traditional pay to play schemes, because at least in the latter there would be a gig to play and hopefully some fans. Using the Sonicbids scheme artists are being forced to pay a fee for a gig that they most likely won't get. None of the headlining spots played by the big names in the business will be using the Sonicbids service as the festival promoters will have searched out the artists they want and booked them separately, so the smaller bands are competing over a few showcase slots.
I can understand why a festival would use this scheme. It generates revenue, it weeds out bands who don't "want it enough", and it saves them the time and hassle of having to open hundreds of mailed in press kits. However, I can't help but feel that the vast majority of people using the service are being screwed out of hard earned cash without a very good chance of getting a show. It's almost like a lottery except the tickets are expensive and your chance of winning isn't random. There is a real chance that if festivals keep using this service to "book" their independent acts, that consumers and concert goers will lose out on those really good acts that just don't have the financial means, or flexible morality required to buy into this new pay to play scheme.
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