We managed to find a backup venue on the same night and all ended well! Thanks for all the support <3
We’ll have a little events page up soon detailing how it went!

Final update:

To close things off, I just want to say despite trans-pecos’ adamant attempts to say otherwise:

• We from the start never “hid” any information. Since planning, this was always meant to be a casual non-furry event that did not feature or include anything furry beyond the fact that these artists are part of the community. Their mails and responses very clearly show they wrongly assumed this to be a “furry fetish event” and were worried about “costumes, masks, headgear”. Furry musicians performing and telling people they’re Furries is NOT the same as performing in suit or inviting people to a dress-up event. That is aside from the fact we explicitly and repeatedly told them this is not that kind of “furry-event”.

It’s disappointing that trans-pecos decided to try to lie their way out, and seems to just completely refuse to make any acknowledgement of a mistake (except for fetishizing, which they apologized for) on adamantly set us up as the ones at fault and overreacting.

Well I guess the case is kinda sealed. This was a pretty one-sided battle with little reason to further engage with beyond this. We now have an awesome backup to go through with at much better conditions, honoured tickets and even welcome fursuits! So yeah. All well that ends well, and thank you all for the love. <3

Irony is a funny thing.

If you’re a Furry and been on Twitter in the past week, you might’ve seen a bunch of discussions about FWA’s (the furry con) choice to book a popular non-furry for one of their main gigs. The main complaint coming from furry musicians who felt like they’re being treated unfairly by essentially not being compensated (beyond a reg + merch) while an outsider gets to eat well. In usual Twitter fashion, a whole battle once again occurred about whether furry events should be solely for furries, and if/how much furry performers should be paid their fair share. As well as discussing why furry-organized events matter so much for the community.

And as fate likes to have it, it gave us a very important, quite infuriating and honest to hell story to tell that heavily relates to this entire conversation.

For those who don’t know us yet, we’re a Furry Music Label and you can read more about us here.

what freaking happened?

Back in November we started plans to host our label’s first irl gig. With the help of one of the involved artists we landed on the trans-pecos venue in New York City, to eventually play on February 28th, 2024. Which is, since it’s 00:23 AM in Europe right now, just as I am writing this.

After having things set in stone, we spent over $1,500 making it happen in big part by funding our artist’s flights and stays, as well as agreed to a $350 venue fee after sales. Rest would be ours.

Now, a couple hours ago our artists arrived in NYC, eager to play at the event we planned months for, only to hear that just as they went in the air, a fight with the venue broke our in our E-Mail inbox in which they argue that we willingly held off information “that we’re furry”, and due to their new-found knowledge by us marketing ourselves as “furry musicians” (it took y’all 4 months to notice??), they now consider us a fetish event. Mind you, from the start have we made clear that this is a family-friendly gig, with early appropriate programming, with no furry/rave “themes, masks or costumes”.

But no, really just because we are Furries, and thus appeal to a Furry audience, we require more security and incur an additional ‘bar guarantee’ fee for the claim that “face coverings inevitably suppress alcohol sales” (Clearly someone’s never been near a furcon before).

So here we are, being demanded an additional cost that is 365%(!) higher than what was previously agreed on. From $350 venue only to $629 + $1,000 bar.

FOR BEING FURRIES.

What the fuck.

Now we’re left scrambling on what to do with our artists who are now upset in NYC, figure our refunds, and sit on a cost of $1.5k of our still pretty thin budget thrown out for absolutely nothing. Might find something, might not.

But both our booking agent (bless you a lot Hazel @ Kind Monster) and us were appalled at the ridiculous amount of unprofessionalism and prejudice we were shown barely 24 hours before what was meant to be our first outing irl showcasing the talent (and that only) of our community in all the appropriate manners we knew they expected us to. As such, we’ve cancelled our event outright and will now work to ensure everyone receives their refund for their booking.

For now there’s not much else to say. If there’s gonna be an update, I’ll post it here marked as such.
Concluding, I just want to say this is EXACTLY why within our Furry community, we need more venues and events built for us. People read their hate fantasies online and deem you a suspect by association and potentially cause thousands in damage and crushed dreams. We need to do better than this.

If you wanna help us out get things in order, we’d appreciate any help. <3
Also, for limited to this week you can use code ‘sigh’ for 50% off on our entire Bandcamp library.

For transparency, here’s the E-Mail exchange that led to this cancellation.

Gig cancelled here after chat with our booking agent

Update 02:50 AM:

So the venue started to be silly on Twitter while we held back on posting this whole page so with that decision here we are showcasing all of it.