furry music night gets cancelled because their venue upcharged them one day in advance thinking it's a "fetish event"
written by ida deerz on February 28, 2024
in cohost, discourse, furry music, music, aural alliance, furry, new york city
this post was previously published on cohost.org!
this post discusses a situation that happened with Aural Alliance about a month before i became a member of the label. i quit the label in September 2024 after the disaster that was Aural Alliance Festival and Finn's mistreatment of artists including myself. i am much more critical towards them now than i was back when i wrote this. i'm mostly leaving this post unedited but i want to make sure this context is clear!
some utterly appalling stuff just happened in the furry music community, with a venue upcharging a furry music label just a few days before an event they were hosting, all because the venue somehow didn't know this was a furry event.
most of this was discussed over on Twitter and Aural Alliance's website, so i imagine most people here on cohost wouldn't have seen any of this go down. it's an absolutely bizarre case of mistreatment and unprofessionalism, possibly even to the point that it constitutes a breach of contact, all because the people hosting it are furries. basically what i'm saying is i think cohost will eat this story right up. :3
what happened?
Aural Alliance is a "socialist spin at music labels" that primarily serves the furry community. it's ran by a handful of people, but mainly by Finn, a furry from Germany, who i believe also runs most of their social media accounts.
Aural Alliance plans on hosting their first IRL show as a way of spotlighting some of their artists. the show is being held on february 28 at Trans-Pecos, a venue in New York City. i'm under the impression that the folks from the label aren't present here, but they have had a booking agent and other folks helping them in putting it together in-person, and they have been bankrolling the whole event and accomodations for the artists such as flights and a place to stay. they report spending over $1500 on artist accomodations alone, and a $350 venue fee on top of that.
the event is 4 months away. all is well! the event gets announced under the name "Nightsona", with the names of the artists and their fursonas/pfps on the announcement.
february 27. Finn gets an email from the venue, asking to renegotiate the room fee for the event. the Trans-Pecos management checked Aural Alliance's social media, found out this was a fetish party (sic!), and explained that this would increase the costs by 20% because according to them, the event would require more security.
Finn responds, stating that this is not a fetish event, it's just a family friendly event ran by furries for the furry community, nobody is bringing any "fetish gear" with them; Finn is clearly hinting at fursuits here, as obviously the assumption that everyone will be wearing a full fursuit to a music event like this is just totally unrealistic. right? right? right???
Trans-Pecos carefully changes their wording and stops referring to it as a "fetish event", but for some reason they do keep insisting that this needs to be branded as an 18+ event that requires extra security to "ensure things are as safe as possible". they're adjusting the room fee to $629 plus an extra $1000 bar guarantee; they still wrongfully assume everyone would be coming in fursuit and they also wrongfully assume this would mean less people are going to buy drinks since they are wearing "face coverings". Aural Alliance has gone from just a $350 venue fee, to possibly $1629 in total venue costs, just a day before the event, after the initial costs were already negotiated and paid for and all the artists were already being flown out to NYC.
Finn once again doubles down on the fact that this is not an event with a "dress up theme", it's not 18+, there are no sexual themes. it's just an event where the performers happen to be furries. it's already obvious nobody would show up in a fursuit to this event, but to make it even clearer to Trans-Pecos, a post gets made on the Aural Alliance Twitter page asking people not to attend in a fursuit. in the email, they also point out how unprofessional it is for Trans-Pecos to upcharge them just a day before the event
Trans-Pecos states that their management is unable to differentiate between an actual fursuiting event, and just an event with non-fursuiting furries present; they clearly think that "furry" is synonymous with "owning a fursuit and wearing it", so they don't understand why it's still marketed as a "furry event" if there's not going to be any fursuiting. they demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of what the furry community is about and how fursuiting works. they claim that this furry theme was kept from them by Aural Alliance. they had four whole months to discover that Aural Alliance is a furry-led music label with all the artists involved being furries themselves, and they somehow decided to only look into this on the last possible day. they restate the new room fee + bar guarantee.
after this back-and-forth emailing between Aural Alliance and Trans-Pecos, we enter the second phase of all this drama:
Nightsona gets cancelled and Trans-Pecos decides to just post through it
Finn decides to formally cancel the event, as the new fees are too much to deal with and they feel that the safety of the community can't be guaranteed by Trans-Pecos anymore after they displayed being woefully misinformed about the furry community in their emails.
Trans-Pecos takes to Twitter to argue with Aural Alliance. pro tip: why would you ever do this. what the fuck. they start arguing that extra security was needed due to "the nature of the booking", but they refuse to explain what "the nature of the booking" is. they're careful not to word it like they think this is some fetish event, but since we already know that's how they referred to this initially, it's obvious they still think this is some kind of fetish event. they state vague concerns about attendees showing up "in costume" wearing "face coverings" and the possibility of attendees getting harassed by people outside the venue for wearing these.
Trans-Pecos changes their wording again, instead of referring to it as a "fetish event" they now refer to it as an event that could be "misconstrued and misrepresented as something sexual in nature". they now complain that Aural Alliance did not represent this event as a furry event. they don't want to state what they mean by "furry event" but it's obvious they're still hung up over the costume/face covering situation.
Respectfully, with all the respect, furry Twitter rips them a new one.
Trans-Pecos keeps complaining about how Finn and Aural Alliance only made it clear that fursuits shouldn't be worn a few days before the event. they feel like Aural Alliance didn't make this clear enough at first.
now, the thing with fursuiting is that it's a very small subset of the furry community. fursuits are a really expensive bespoke luxury item; statistics show that only 10-15% own a fullsuit, but even then these statistics are from 2011 and i imagine as the furry fandom became more popular with just artists and young people since then, that number has gone down even more across the board. fursuits are often very unwieldy and you can overheat very easily while wearing one; even at furry conventions, precautions must be taken for people to fullsuit safely, to the point where generally people won't even bother wearing one if they don't have the appropriate space for it and they don't have a fursuit handler with them.
to suggest that this venue would fill up with exclusively fursuiters is insane. from the get go it should have been obvious that this wouldn't happen. sure, there may be a handful of people crazy enough to wear a fursuit to an event like this, but you're looking at like two or three people in total, which is way different from what Trans-Pecos assumed would happen. my best guess is that they looked up "furries", saw pictures of fursuiters gathered together at a con — a specific location designed to allow for fursuiting — and then assumed that this would be what the attendance at the venue would look like. and instead of checking in with Aural Alliance to see if this assumption was correct, they decided to upcharge them just a day before the show based on this false assumption.
Aural Alliance didn't make it explicitly clear that this was a no-fursuit event, because this was already widely understood. Trans-Pecos tried claiming that Aural Alliance behaved disingenuously by only making this clear a day before the event, failing to realize that this was already clear but unspoken for months.
there's also the irony in the fact that they were so worried about this event coming across as a "furry event", yet it took them four whole months to notice it themselves. because that's what this was; it's literally just a label showcase for people within the furry community.
what now?
Finn has stated that with the help of donations from the community, they were able to find a backup venue for the artists. it's still yet to be announced where this will be, and some of the artists have already left NYC, but at least the event is still going to be held even if it's a bit different than they planned. if you want to help Aural Alliance, their Ko-fi and Bandcamp links can be found below along with their Twitter in case anyone wants updates from them on the whole situation.
(links have been redacted)
they have also posted a writeup of the whole situation on their site, including screenshots of all the email conversations they had with Trans-Pecos that i am sourcing for this post.
https://www.auralalliance.page/cancellednyc