(This is a follow up to my post “How to Supercharge Your Band’s Bookings.” You can read it on Steve Nixon’s blog.)
So you got the gig. Awesome! Now you need to make a good impression and get booked there again. If you draw well, this shouldn’t be a problem. But what if your attendance has been spotty? Here are a few of my favorite techniques as well as a word of caution.
WORD OF CAUTION: You can’t expect to spend $0 on marketing and promotion and have a successful show. The venue needs to see that you are spending your own time and money to promote a show – you’ll earn a great deal of respect from them. My fan recruitment techniques necessitate spending at least your first night of earnings IN ADVANCE to get butts in seats. You will make $0, maybe less on your first couple of shows. However you’ll gain professional respect from the venue and your next gigs will pay out in spades.
These techniques fall in to two categories: “More Fans” and “Less Cost to Venue.”
Less Cost – “Insure” Your Gig
If you have a performance contract, request from the venue that you get paid $0 unless you bring X number of covers. If you don’t have a contract, refuse to accept money from the venue owner if your draw is less than stellar. I have turned down money and it resulted in a second chance every single time.
Less Cost- Drink On Your Dime
Many venues comp food and drink to band members. Lots of guys abuse this, particularly at smaller venues (bars, irish pubs, blues clubs, etc). When your waitress arrives, turn down the comp and tell her that you want to carry your own weight. Which brings us to…..
More Fans – Tip, Tip, Tip
The best way to promote your band is to get the venue’s staff working for you. Most musicians are cheap. Waitresses are used to this. They are also frequently the gateway to another gig. So tip the crap out of them. At our first show at a bar outside of Chicago, our draw was ok but not stellar. We took entire $550 check and make sure the wait staff and bartenders were each tipped out. This worked out to $50-$75 per person. It was really really expensive but paid off. We got our “second chance” one month later. The staff promoted our band to every single person they saw for an entire month. When we showed up to load in the bar was already turning people away at the door and their patio was jammed. It was one of the best Fridays in the bar’s history. The booking agent called me that Monday and faxed in a performance agreement for 1 Friday per month for the next 12 months at $650 per show. Not a bad night, and our $550 investment yielded a return of $8,350 plus merch sales. Ten months later we booked an additional year at $750 per show.
More Fans – Party Bus
Although we had a decent fan base in the city of Chicago, tons of our fans were suburbanites. We had a big show at Hard Rock and needed to bring our ‘A’ game. We rented two charter busses, one from the north side and one from the south side. Pickup points were suburban bars that booked us regularly. (Of course they appreciated that since it increased their bar receipts for that night.) Everyone met, bussed in to the city, watched our show, partied, and went home. That night we made 3 venues happy – Hard Rock and the two pickup/drop off locations. We spend $1,000 but it was offset by “passing the hat” for the bus drivers’ tips, on-bus merch sales, and future bookings at the suburban bars.
More Fans – Use Craig’s List
Craig’s List is a great place to get fans, but don’t use the musician forum. Don’t use the activities forum. Use the jobs board. Post an ad that you’re looking for girls to come out to your show and that they’ll get free drinks and/or a few bucks for 1-2 hours’ work. Make sure you let the venue owner know that you would like to run a tab for some VIPs to ensure that it’s ok with them. Ask the girls to bring friends. Then have a friend with a camera take pics, post ‘em on your band’s web site and watch the single guys flock to your shows!
Other Random Stuff
I started my Monday by going to the only place in the world where I allow myself to get punched in the face – an MMA school near my house. (Used to get beat up at home too – Stephanie isn’t allowed to drink tequila any more though, so we’re all good).
After getting the class schedule, I gave the owner a bit of crap for not having a very good web site – even when I search for their name online I can’t find their friggin’ site. Not good. She, agreed and asked if I do web design, to which I said “hell no!”
(You can tell by looking around BGD that I’m not much good with this stuff. Take a look-see at this web site. Nothing fancy. No customizations. I’m sure I’m not using half the plugins I could (or should) be using. I’ve always been more on the deal-making side of the business. Of course, now that I’m trying to get things going on my own, it has become necessary to get in the trenches a bit more.)
After telling my sensei’s wife that I wasn’t up for the gig, I got to thinking – How long would it take this guitar player/bizdev guy to re-create a web site using WordPress? I decided to find out.
We started with this site: http://martialartslv.com
The goal was to use as much of their content as possible, not adding any bells and whistles, but clean the site up a little bit, get some data capture happening, make it a bit more user friendly and maybe get some very basic SEO and a site map going.
Total time to complete: 64 minutes. Here’s the timeline:
3.16pm talk to susie, bitch about her website.
3.18pm decide to try and make her one that isn’t as shitty, very quickly.
3.19pm start searching for domains.
3.20pm decide that lasvegasdojo.com would be perfect.
3.21pm what if I want to use the .com for a review site though? I give her the .info, point nameservers to MT account.
3.25pm start WP install, add lasvegasdojo.com to my list of projects that will never ever get completed.
3.27pm wait for the nameservers to move over. Damn you, GoDaddy.
3.32pm WP install complete, searching for template.
3.34pm template chosen.
3.34pm pause to talk to buddy about headaches and dog adoptions.
3.46pm back on my game – lots of content covered in a 12 minute conversation.
3.47pm pulling down images, copying content, building pages to match old site.
4.01pm legacy site loads pretty fucking slow. i’m waiting…..
4.35pm ….and I’m done.
The finished product can be viewed here: http://www.lasvegasdojo.info
Because I was trying to do this quickly (and because their current fighters and schedule are not available online), those pages are place holders. The rest is good to go though.
Any of you more established WP gurus have any suggestions for making this thing better on the cheap?