newvibes

Just found a story about the City of Glasgow councils new weapon against illegal gig fly posting. They’ve started putting cancelled stickers on all posters that break the councils posting rules. According to the story the council spend £100,000 a year battling against illegal fly posting, that’s a lot of money.

I remember back in the day when I used to put on regular gigs one of the best ways to promote it was to hand out fliers without council permission. They never had designated fly posting areas and there was really no alternative available other than to hand out posters and fliers to people face to face or posting up your posters wherever there was space around the city. At one point Dundee council would then go after people who were posting them to cover the costs for removal. Eventually through a lot of pressure the council created several areas around the city where you could post your fliers and gig posters by handing them into the council. A member of the council would then go to all the areas putting up your posters for you, which was a pretty good idea, but you had to rely on them putting the posters up well in advance and sometimes they never even made it… other times they’d get covered by other posters even though the event you were putting on hadn’t even happened yet. Not very efficient.

Walking around the East End of Glasgow there seems to be plenty of room for posters on building site barriers and wooden fences and to be honest a lot of the design work put into the posters is quite good and actually brightens the place up a little. Glasgow doesn’t have the best looking city center put it that way. Glasgow is a huge city, with lots going on, so it makes sense to try and put some money aside to generate more legal designated fly posting areas if they want to control the posters. What looks worse, a well designed artistic poster or patches of paint everywhere?

Of course I think that some people take the piss and post in some inappropriate areas but I think a bit of common sense on both sides and this problem can be resolved.