Once upon a time, I was in a rap group back home in CT and we got the "opportunity" to be openers for this concert where Funk Flex and a couple others were the headliners. It was a "pay-to-play" transaction which meant we paid the promoters about $200 to "secure our spot", and in return we got about 30-40 tickets to sell if we chose, for any price we wanted to sell them for. We were all young as hell and didn't know any better. In fact everyone we asked said that's how it usually works (IT DOES NOT).

So about 3 hours before the event, it starts raining like crazy. I'm talking torrential downpour, and the promoters take to twitter to say that the show is cancelled because of the weather. So I hit up the rest of the group saying if the show's cancelled we need to get our money back. And maybe 30 mins later, the promoters tweet again saying "jk, the show is back on". I interpreted that as a cop-out so they didn't have to give all the openers their money back, and I wanted a refund for us anyway. But the rest of the group voted to do the show, so I reluctantly went.

We get there, and the promoter is nowhere to be found. There's maybe 30 people in the crowd (including the other openers) because it started raining again and people didn't want to slip & slide all the way to & from the venue. So we do our set, and immediately afterwards I'm asking everyone where Reggie (the promoter's name) is. Everyone's playing dumb with me, until one of the other openers says that he's in the green room with Funk Flex. So I go down there and I get into with security because they're not letting me in. So after about 10 mins of arguing with security and almost getting thrown out, I tell the rest of the crew on the ride home I'm never doing the pay-to-play shit again. If people ask us to perform as a crew, they better have money FOR US.