A Small Venue Survivalist Saturday Suggestion
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
Unreliable people and unreliable gear are worse than no people and no gear.
Thanks, Schwillyfamilymusicians.com!
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
When I miss a post, it’s usually because I have something else to do. In this case, that something else was a guest post. Here’s a pull-quote to whet your appetite:
“Hard work and tenaciousness are the tools necessary to help you be ‘in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, playing the right material, to the right crowd,’ but with anything that involves the tastes and opinions of humans, luck will always be a significant factor.”
Thanks for reading, everybody!
The alloy of art and money is best made “up front.”
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
There’s an attitude in the music world – one of many – and it’s a bad attitude. Unhelpful. Works against the very people who have it.
I’ve been guilty of it.
It’s the attitude that art is a beautiful, pure, self-creating and self-sustaining thing, and that money is an evil, dirty, crass creature that should never touch art. It’s an attitude that’s rooted in a kernel of truth: When the reins are taken by the folks who are fascinated with the business side as an end in itself, then art tends to suffer. The industry becomes a caricature of itself. When music becomes just another manufacturing process, driven by very little more than just growing from quarter to quarter, then the chances of making something amazing tend to drop.
The problem with giving the kernel of truth more than its due is that you have to start denying reality. Writing, performing, or technically supporting music is an occupation for humans. Humans engage in occupations to find meaning in their lives and create things of value. We create things of value in the hopes that we can exchange those things for things we need more of. Like, you know, food. And places to sleep. And sweet amps, and awesome guitars, and cool drumkits, and PA systems that can rattle every building in a one-mile radius WOOOOOO!!!! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK, TOQUERVILLE?
Toquerville is a small town in Utah, by the way.
Where was I?
As near as I can tell, being a professional musician (or music support human) is about creating a brilliant alloy of art and business. It’s about mixing these two materials that are precious for different reasons, so as to make a whole that serves a useful purpose. If you want to view art as “silver” and business as “gold” (or the inverse), then the alloy you’re talking about is electrum.
Hence the post title.
The way this analogy shakes out is that, if you want to work with an alloy, you’re best served by making the alloy as the first step in the process of crafting something. If you want to be a professional music human, you will do well to be conscious of the business side at the inception of your career crafting the artistic side. If you aren’t, then you’ll have to tack the business side on later, and that’s not always the best thing.
The thing with alloyed metal is that it’s really hard to make after you’ve already built something. If you want to add gold to an already-made silver item, then you’re pretty much stuck with plating the gold onto the surface of the object. To actually mix the two metals, you’re probably going to have to wreck the structure of the thing that’s been made, and start again.
In the same way, starting a musical endeavor that’s “pure silver” (all art, no business) is perfectly doable. You can make some amazing tunes, and have some great times. You can ignore the money, or even reject the business side entirely. That’s all fine and good if it’s what you actually intend to do. It’s not so fine and good if you get the idea that the business side will just magically “work out.”
It probably won’t.
What’s more likely to happen is that you’ll quit when you can’t afford the time, money, or both required to make more art. If your art appeals to a great many people, then you may end up getting taken for a ride by managers/ labels/ club owners/ whoever that really know how to bend the business aspect to their will. In the best case scenario, someone will figure out a way to do a nice job adding a practical business to an artistic substrate. “Plating” the business onto the surface of a “pure art” base is doable – and can even be done well – but it’s still just a foreign thing that’s sitting atop something else.
On the other hand, if you decide from day one that you’re going to be realistic about the business side, you retain a lot of control. You know where the money is, and where it isn’t. You can take charge of career decisions in a rational way, because you’ll have factually-supported notions of what would be fun (but expensive), less fun (but good for some cash flow right now), and freakin’ awesome (and likely to generate a ton of income). When you integrate a seriousness – not an overriding obsession, just seriousness – about the business side, and do it right away, then you’ve just given yourself an edge. You’re not just claiming to be a pro, you’re taking the steps to ensure that you are a pro.
Business can wreck things, it’s true. However, it’s far less likely to wreck things and corrupt the art if it’s integrated and well understood from day one. That’s because you, the art person, are in charge of it. You’re much more likely to have trouble with business if you don’t have any understanding of it, and then try to bring a not-very-artistic business human on board to run things that are already out of control.
If you want to craft with electrum, make the alloy before you’ve already built everything.
Naturally scarce things stay valuable naturally. Artificially scarce things lose value despite all the effort involved.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
I can share this picture with any number of people, but it can’t replace the experience of actually being at a Stonefed gig.When the whole Napster thing hit, I was one of those folks that didn’t get it.
I got all wrapped up in this idea that people were being jerks by taking music, and I wasn’t afraid to tell people how I felt about it. I had this notion that what we had was an attitude problem, and everybody’s attitude had to be fixed.
Over ten years later, I feel differently. I’ve come to realize that computing has fundamentally altered the landscape of the media, and that the alteration was by no means “unnatural.” That is, the fundamental rules of value weren’t somehow broken by us all getting high-speed, high-availability data that could transmit music. The way things are valued underwent a huge change, but not actually in a way that’s alien and incomprehensible.
Yes, there have been some very uncomfortable and unhappy consequences, but a lot of BS is also getting flushed down the toilet – and that’s a good thing. I think there’s a decent chance that these growing pains we’re experiencing are a doorway to a reality where the things that are naturally valuable, that really matter, are what will retain their value.
Things could go all topsy-turvy again at any moment, but I see the live performance as becoming more and more the locus of a musician’s ability to create value for themselves and others.
Here’s why.
Way back when, recorded music was physically scarce. The equipment and facilities necessary to record sound were much more difficult to acquire, and the distribution media was actual, physical media. A record (the actual round thing with grooves) wasn’t something that just anybody could create on a whim. Recorded music was naturally scarce, naturally tangible, and naturally hard to reproduce without explicit permission. As a relatively scarce physical good, recorded music had a sort of natural monetary value. People who could afford recorded music bought it without a second thought, because you had to have a physical thing to play the music, and you couldn’t just make a copy for someone else.
As technology marched along, though, there was an inexorable shift. The technology required to put music-representing information into a form that machines could play back got cheaper and cheaper. There was still a good bit of scarcity, though. For instance, you could copy your favorite record to a cassette tape, but it took the entire linear play-time of the record to do so. You could make a copy for a friend, but it wasn’t a trivial process. Even with a high-speed dubbing deck, it could take a while to create the copy – and generation loss meant that the copy of the copy had a good deal more noise (and other artifacts). It was unlikely that the average Joe had a multi-copy tape deck around, so there usually weren’t many dupes to be had. The dupes also still had to be physically present for playback to occur.
So, even with consumer-writable media, recorded music was still pretty scarce.
The situation above continued to develop. We eventually gained the ability to make digital copies, which made generation loss a negligible problem. Even when the price of write-capable optical drives dropped, and the media became more affordable, there was no great tsunami of change.
And then, it became possible for regular folks to compress digital data that represented music. It also became possible for people to transfer that data between remote computers, and to do so without a fixed piece of media. (Yes, they needed network infrastructure, but the data isn’t “fixed” to the network cables. It just travels across the network media.)
Recorded music wasn’t scarce anymore.
See, the entire point of a computer is to store, change, copy, and transfer data, and to do all that as quickly as possible. Once recorded music became computer-manageable data, its scarcity was all over. You didn’t need individual pieces of physical media. Making copies was trivial, and got even more trivial. Transferring the copies was trivial, and got even more trivial.
Now then.
The record companies and established recording artists didn’t really like this, because their business model was and is based on the idea of recordings being scarce. As a result, the record companies hatched (and continue to hatch) all kinds of strategies to create artificial scarcity. Copy protection systems, DRM for file-based media, royalty schemes that are tailor-made for terrestrial radio but crazy for network streaming…all of it is built, even if unconsciously, around trying to keep recordings scarce.
The problem, though, is that anything you can turn into data is not scarce anymore. Fast computers and fast data have made demanding money for a piece of media obsolete. (Politely asking for money as a “thank you” for an experience is not obsolete, however.) All the copy-protection and DRM schemes in the world can’t change the simple fact that the entire globe basically runs on machines and networks which are purposefully and specifically designed to make data as un-scarce as possible.
What this means is that the intrinsic, monetary value of the data itself will drop to some minimum. The minimum may be zero, or it might not be. I don’t know.
Anyway, this is where the live show comes in.
I’m not just saying this because audio for live performance is what I do.
I’m saying this because it’s the conclusion that seems to be supported by the facts I’ve got.
As of this writing, we don’t have a way to convert an actual show into data, and that means that live shows are – digitally speaking – rare. Sure, someone can record the show on video and post the file, but you can’t make a copy of actually being there. You can’t mass-duplicate being in the crowd, and having the band right there, and being in a moment that can only happen NOW and never again. You can’t.
Now, if we ever find a way to digitize and store memories, all bets will be off. If we ever find a way to have true, full-blown, full-fidelity telepresence, the all the bets will be even more off. (If we get to that point, though, I’m betting that we’ll have made it to a completely post-scarcity society. Or a horrific dystopia. Could go either way, I guess.)
The point is still that we haven’t yet found a way to get realtime, ephemeral experiences into a form that’s trivially copied and shared. Thus, the immediate and transitory reality of a live show with a live band has tremendously more intrinsic scarcity than recorded music does. Heck, it has more intrinsic scarcity than recorded music EVER had. Big record companies could stamp a lot of vinyl, but they couldn’t make copies of the actual band.
So what?
So, I say, record your music. Record it as well as you can. Shape it, polish it, and be proud of it. Even so, recognize that the recording as a saleable product in and of itself is not the concept that it used to be. The recording is a mass-marketing tool for your act, and one that you may be able to get some money from. That money, though, comes from the experience of liking and supporting the band, instead of paying to be in possession of information. The recording is data that represents how cool your songs are, just like your artist bio is data that represents how cool your band is. The purpose of this data is to be shared by as many people as possible.
Why?
Because it helps to create a lot of value around the very scarce experience of being in a room and listening to you craft an experience in real time. At least for the time being, that experience is naturally rare, and therefore precious.
The sonic success of your show is about the whole mix, not just one “sound.”
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
I don’t know exactly why it is, but I have a particular dislike for the folks I call “ball hogs.”
It’s highly ironic that I call them that, because I’m not much of a sports fan. I mean, I’m not against sports, because they’re a great vehicle for sitting on the couch and eating unhealthy snacks.
Anyway.
Ball hogs are the people who think it’s all about them, and grab all the attention for themselves. In the music world, this can take different forms. Some ball hogs operate by playing past the scheduled end of their set time, denying other performers their full slot. Other ball hogs do their thing by operating under the delusion that the sound of the whole show hinges on THEIR sound.
In the latter case, what you have is a prioritization problem – and it’s one of the worst, because it can do exactly what you don’t want:
Drive the audience away.
Audiences are driven away by prioritization problems because they tend to create volume problems. Either the whole experience is way too freakin’ loud, or the ball hog ends up obscuring some part of the song that actually has greater priority.
You’ve never heard that, right? Sure, you’ve heard people say that a snare drum had a great sound, or fit in the mix perfectly, but I guarantee that nobody has ever been so captivated by the nuances of a snare tone that the actual song ceased to matter.
The harsh truth is that most audience-members are basically uninterested in the details of any particular instrument’s sound. Now, of course, the people in the seats don’t want any particular instrument’s timbre to be unenjoyable. Show goers are by no means indifferent to a guitar tone that’s outright awful, or a bass sound that’s all wrong, or a drumkit that could be mistaken for a whole bunch of wet cardboard. They do notice those things, and wonder why they aren’t fixed.
What most audience members don’t notice, though, is “that special way the air moves when I get that full-stack ROARING.” They’re essentially oblivious to “how the snare sounds so full and Zeppelin-esque when I’m REALLY hitting it.” They don’t give two hoots that “the bass just has this perfect rumble when I CRANK the master volume.”
They really don’t care.
What they do care about is how they can’t hear the chord progression – or worse – that the lyrics are getting drowned. What they do care about is that getting to the show cost them significant money, time, and effort, and they aren’t enjoying themselves because it’s SO LOUD. (That latter issue has a tendency to get people mad. Really mad. It’s a real downer, especially if they take their anger out on somebody who isn’t actually causing the problem.)
My personal experience is only one example, but still…the number of times I’ve ever been complimented on getting a great [insert instrument here] sound is so low that I can’t even remember the last time it happened. When I have been complimented, it’s been about the mix as a whole. When people walk up to FOH control and say “it sounds SO good,” the “it” refers to the complete sonic experience.
…and, of course, I’ve had plenty of complaints about shows being too loud.
Heck, I once did a show with a stupid-loud drummer where an audience member walked up, told me that all he could hear were the drums, and then declared that it was “the worst show ever.” There wasn’t much I could do, because overcoming the kit’s volume would have required that the whole show become unbearably intense.
I’m sure the kit sounded good to the drummer, though.
I’ve been at shows where bass or guitar players would crank up to their “signature sound’s” required volume, and people would just get up and leave. Whatever merch those folks were going to buy? That revenue was gone. The drinks and food those people were going to consume? That was now a non-issue. The encouragement they were going to give their friends to “check out that killer band?” It just turned into “don’t go to their shows, because it’s so loud that it hurts.”
Those players just wiped out a chunk of their audience, and all it took was one misplaced priority. In the music biz, things can really “spill over” in a hurry. Sound problems become business problems at an alarming speed, and the damage can be much bigger than anyone can easily realize.
Yes, of course we should strive to get great guitar tones. We should work on making the bass fun to listen to. We should try our best to make the drums exciting.
Yes.
But we also have to realize that getting any one thing “just so” at the cost of the whole experience isn’t worth it.
We’ve got to have our priorities in the right place.
If you want to be smart about promoting your band and your shows, you need to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
I do NOT subscribe to the notion that “if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.” I think there’s all kinds of room for things that are experienced, undertaken, and managed at an intuitive level. There isn’t a single thing wrong with saying, “this seems to be working really well, so let’s go with it.”
At the same time, though, I’m a proponent of quantifying things when there’s freedom to do so. This freedom seems to come along after you get to a certain comfort level.
Sometimes, a DIScomfort level.
Anyway.
You get to a point where things either seem to be working, or they seem to not be working, and you get a second to step back, scratch the ol’ noggin, and try to suss out the whys and wherefores. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in an artistic, technical, or business discipline – you eventually reach a state of needing (or wanting) to get at some underlying science.
You know. Numbers. Stats. Correlations.
When it comes to doing promo for your band’s recordings and shows, I’m of the opinion that it’s better to start figuring out the numbers early. If nothing else, being willing to take “the hard look” at what’s working and what isn’t can save you both money and effort in the long run – and who doesn’t want to have more cash and more free time?
When I say the word “analytics,” it may be pretty intimidating. I’m a pretty tech and science savvy dude, and it was a touch intimidating to me when I hadn’t really gotten into it. The reality, though, is that being analytical about your promo comes down to one basic concept:
Each piece of your promotion should have some way to unambiguously self-report on its effectiveness.
Huh?
Okay. Let’s rewind.
Think about some ads that you’ve seen lately, especially if they were in some “traditional media” channel. It doesn’t matter what they were for. Did the promo say anything about “mention this ad and [some reward will be offered to you]?”
If the answer was yes, then the advertisement was set up to self-report on its effectiveness. The advertiser offered a special incentive for a customer to mention that specific ad campaign, with the goal being to keep track of how many people actually mention the ad. If a ton of people mention the ad and claim the incentive (“Two For One!” or whatever) then the advertiser knows that – at some level – the ad campaign was effective in reaching an audience. Either the tallied number of people saw the ad and responded, or a smaller number of people saw the ad and passed on the information to their friends.
Now, if they’re really smart, the advertiser will keep track of how much each incentive-claimer bought, and whether or not the aggregate profits offset the cost of the advertising. This is why all the big retailers have reward cards and other ways of invading your privacy. They want to gather as much data as possible, and then correlate your buying habits with their profit and loss statements. In real time, if possible.
I could get into what it means if you answered “no” to the question “Was an incentive offered for mentioning the ad,” but that’s not really germane to this article.
Anyway.
The point is that figuring out whether or not your promo is effective means embedding a measurement strategy in the promo itself.
So…how DO you embed measurement into your promotional efforts?
The most immediate way is to use promo channels that already have measurement and reporting built in. Even at the most basic level, you can make observations about Facebook likes and shares, or Twitter favorites and retweets. You can then compare those numbers to all kinds of different things – when you sent out the Facebook post, what wording you used, when and where the show was scheduled, etc. Counting the number of responses you get is obvious, and I’m sure you already do it. However, you might not already be trying to correlate those “measures of engagement” with the various strategies that you try.
This is all fine and good, but what if you’re trying a promo method that isn’t web-based? For instance, lots of bands post flyers, but I know of very few bands that know if they actually work or not.
Mostly, I think bands post flyers because other bands posted them in the past. It’s a tradition!
Anyway…
This is where an incentive program can come in very handy.
For instance, you could have some special merch (like a free CD and sticker) to give away to anybody who comes to the show and brings a flyer with them. If you’d rather not have people pulling your flyers down, you could also make the same offer for anyone who comes in with a cellphone picture of the flyer.
You do need to be careful that you can afford the incentive. You might need to put a limit on the number of redemptions, if the incentive is relatively “spendy.” (“The first 10 people to bring in a flyer get a free shirt!”) It’s fine to get people in the door with a promo, but if the cost of the campaign outweighs the benefits of a larger audience, then the promotion wasn’t worth it.
You also need to be aware of whether or not your incentive actually focuses on your music, or if it focuses on something else. It’s perfectly fine to make a deal with a venue where people with cellphone pics of your flyer get a discount on a hamburger, but you need to be aware that some folks will take the picture and make the trip only for the food. On the other hand, incentives for band merch and cheaper admission make the promo solely about your band and your show.
Once you have your incentive program operating, you do need to remember to count. At the very least, make a note of how many people took advantage of the incentive and when. (This can be as simple as marking a tally on a sheet of paper with a date at the top.) When you relate this information to other numbers that you already have, you can start to get an objective picture about your different promo activities.
The ultimate goal is to figure out what promotions get attention AND actually make you more money. It’s not that making more money is the only worthwhile goal. It’s that turning a profit is one worthwhile goal among many…
…and measuring your marketing is very helpful in achieving that end.
Show promotion is an expense like any other: It shrinks or grows based on risk and reward.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
Music folks of all kinds, from instrumentalists to vocalists, sitar players to sound guys, are often their own worst enemies when it comes to the business side of the…er…business. Maybe I’m just trying to flatter myself, but I don’t think it’s because we’re mentally lazy or incapable of analytical thought. No, I believe the root of the problem is that “business” is a discipline that’s separate from music and production, and so it doesn’t get developed to the same extent.
Or it doesn’t get developed at all.
As such, music humans can get bamboozled by business myths, or easily blinded by “gussied up” portrayals of how the industry works.
One of the areas that seems to be the most opaque is that of promotion. There’s no shortage of people who provide services related to it, and you can’t swing a stuffed-toy marmot without hitting someone on the Internet who dispenses advice about it. Promotion suffers from “mythology” as much as anything else I’ve encountered over the years, and I myself have blundered into believing fairy-tales.
Let’s just say that it took me until only a few years ago to realize that show promo isn’t a magical process. It’s entirely understandable to me that frustrated musicians and techs, having worked their tails off for a night that was poorly attended, will begin to say that someone “should have promoted more,” or “those people over there should have spent more money on building a buzz for the show.” There’s a belief (that I shared for a long time) that promo dollars bring people to performances in predictable ways.
It’s a false belief, but it sticks around because massive, sold-out stadium gigs get a lot of press. We make the mistake of thinking that correlation implies causation (it doesn’t), and so we figure that all that press brought a ton of people to the show (maybe it did, maybe it didn’t). We also reckon that if we did press on a similar scale, more people would come to our shows (maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t).
Before going further, I should point out that I am still an outsider to the show-promotion world. I’ve made a good number of observations through the years, and I’ve even gained some hands-on experience with show promo and marketing in general. However, I have never been on staff with a firm that did concert marketing as its core business. As such, when it comes to things like numbers and percentages, I have no choice but to make educated guesses.
My defense for these guesses is that they seem to line up with actual realities that I’ve experienced. Those actual realities have played out in a way that suggests that promotion is a slice of the overall “pie” of show production costs, and that the slice’s absolute and proportional sizes are dependent on a number of factors.
Like I said before, show promo isn’t magical. If there’s any foundational theory that the rest of this is based on, it’s that idea of non-magic. Lots of people think that promotion “creates” show attendees, but it actually doesn’t. Show promotion is just like other marketing effort, in that:
Show promo is primarily the act of informing a band’s existing, invested fanbase that an appearance by the group has been planned.
The key words above are “primarily,” “existing,” and “invested.” Sure, there are some folks that might see the promotion and get intrigued by the mere fact that something’s going on, but the main purpose is to connect with the folks who are already tuned in. Marketing ISN’T to reach the indifferent masses – it’s to reach the people who you’re very sure will go, “Shut up and take my money!” People run big, generalized campaigns for TV sets, because vast swaths of people are interested in buying them. People don’t run prime-time TV commercials for mic-preamps, because most folks don’t give a rip about ’em.
To bring this back to show-promo, though, think about a superstar, like Taylor Swift. Whether you like Taylor Swift or not, she packs stadiums. She also has a lot of promotional effort behind her. Now – here’s the question: What percentage of the people in that stadium were indifferent to Ms. Swift, yet came to the show solely because of the promo blitz?
That percentage is probably tiny. Yes, there are some folks in the crowd who are indifferent (or even dislike) Taylor Swift, but are there because a friend or family member dragged them along. Their presence is not a direct result of the promotion for the show. The fans who are invested – who are singing along, dying for a chance to see Ms. Swift up close, and are ready to buy a TON of merch – those are the people that the promotion was aimed at.
(By the way, in the above paragraphs, I’m lumping all promotion together. Expensive traditional media, essentially free social media, and middle-cost self-managed web presence are all in there.)
It makes sense, then, that promotional efforts need to be large enough to reach the audience that is expected to be listening, while not being so large that they’re wasted on people who aren’t:
The “promo” slice of the production expense pie grows in proportion to the number of people expected to be listening intently for the promotion’s message.
It might not seem like this busts the “if we only would have promoted more…” myth, but it does. You can’t promote a show into success if nobody gives a hoot about the act to start with. Taylor Swift gets a ton of big-dollar promotion because she has a ton of fans already – her act is “generally” marketable.
Another myth of promotion is that more work or more expense gets better results.
Horsefeathers.
More effective and more targeted promotion gets better results. Expense and/ or effort is mutually exclusive. This is because of the previous points above – promo is about getting the news to the people who are ready to listen.
Before the era of high-speed, high-availability data and social networking, you had to use traditional media for promotions. The traditional media outlets had defacto control over who could reach an audience, and a good amount of cash was required to gain access to that audience. Part of the reason for that expense and its justification was because of the massive coverage that the media outlets had. They would quote all kinds of demographics to potential advertisers. They would supply every kind of table and chart to illustrate how many thousands or millions of people they reached, how many of those people were in certain age groups, how many bought some product last year, and all kinds of other things.
Even so, it was all a game of averages. If you spent the money to do promo via a massive outlet, you hoped that the gargantuan audience held enough interested people to make the expense worthwhile. If you weren’t sure about the mass appeal of what you were promoting, you saved money by going with more niche media. Still, all you had was a hope that someone might hear the message and respond in some way.
Particularly for artists, there was a way around this:
The fanclub.
The fanclub was a list of people who you knew were listening for information about you. There was almost no uncertainty at all – they had raised their hands and said, “I want to be informed about every concert and every release and every poster and what the band had for breakfast and…”
With this information in hand, a band could do laser-targeted promo at a very controlled cost. Postage was non-trivial, but you knew that the message was going directly to someone who wanted to hear it.
The modern fanclub is social media.
Social media isn’t perfect. To some degree, the service provider (Twitter, Facebook, G+) still exerts a certain amount of “gateway” control. At the same time, social media allows a band to promote their shows directly to an audience that has actively declared their interest. The cost involved is even less than postage, in terms of cash required to reach any individual recipient. Even better, the “post” message engagement is measurable. You can see things like retweets, likes, and shares. There’s a much more readily measurable indication of what worked and what didn’t.
The “promo” slice of the production expense pie can actually shrink as the ability to directly reach an invested audience grows.
Again, I’m going to use Taylor Swift as an example. A few days ago, she (or her management) posted to Twitter that she was going to play five shows at the O2 in London. When I looked, that tweet had 9000 favorites and 11,000 retweets. The tweet probably took someone a minute to compose. It was sent out for free – no postage required. Nine thousand people thought it was cool enough to favorite, and 11,000 people thought it was so cool that they sent it along. If each of those 11,000 people only has 10 followers, that means that the message has reached 110,000 people.
At no major cost to the artist, if at any direct cost at all.
And it’s all a lot more trackable than an ad on radio, TV, or the newspaper. I’m sure there will be promotion via those outlets for the shows, but will it be more effective than one tweet just because it was more expensive, or took more work?
I doubt it.
The final part of this discussion is the bit that’s easiest to get wrong. It’s easy to get wrong because of the myths surrounding the issues that have already been put on the table.
It’s the idea that all promotion generates more profit, so greater promotional expenses are always justified. If promo were “magic,” then this would be a safe assumption, but it isn’t, so it ain’t.
It would be great if it WAS true. Believe me, when I was a venue operator, I would have jumped at the chance to get $2.00 back for every buck that went into promotional efforts. Heck, I probably would have been on board if it was even $1.50 or $1.25 per dollar.
But, that’s not how it works.
For traditional media, there are a lot of “minimum” costs. The first minimum cost is the barrier to any entry at all – how much money does it take to get any ad space? The next minimum cost is the barrier to effectiveness. The barrier to effectiveness is the money required to get an ad with placement that catches the attention of your hoped-for audience.
The problem, then, is that cost and uncertainty of effectiveness easily overpower a promotions budget.
I don’t know about anyone else, but based on my previous experiences, I would say this:
The “promo” slice of the production expense pie should not usually exceed 25% of the expected PROFIT from the promoted event or group of events.
I printed “profit” in caps because it’s easy to confuse profit with revenue. Back when I ran my own room, my average revenue was about $74/ show. I had a killer arrangement in terms of rent, as I was essentially subsidized by New Song Presbyterian. Seven dollars from each show went out in recognition of that upkeep. I paid myself with what was left over, and took personal responsibility for most supplies, equipment, and other expenses. That amounted to about $26 per show.
The profit, then, was around $41 per event. If we round up, we could say that the maximum prudent budget for per-show promo would be $11.00.
Eleven smackers buys absolutely nothing in terms of traditional media. All of my “promo margin” saved over a year would have been enough to buy exactly one, 8-unit ad in The City Weekly. (I could have purchased multiple smaller ads, but they would have been too easy to miss.) Even if I had gotten that big, omnibus ad, would it have increased my profitability?
My guess is no, because the ad wouldn’t have been specifically targeted. I might have gotten more booking requests, but I didn’t have any trouble keeping the room busy. The risk that spending the promo money would be nothing more than vanity was very real. This leads to another rule-of-thumb:
The “promo” slice of the production expense pie isn’t worth spending if you have little confidence that the expense will grow the size of the entire pie.
The bottom line is that any production expense has to be justified in terms of making the show better, or making the show more profitable. If there’s a huge question mark in the profitability vs. promo area, then it’s far better to spend the promo budget on something else.
If cutting out a piece of a pie is supposed to get you more pie later, and it doesn’t, then you may as well have thrown that slice in the trash.
The music business has a surprisingly low incidence of people being paid to be musicians. There are a good number of people being paid to “draw,” though.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
The big, red note is what musicians think they’re getting paid for. Actually, most musical acts are paid for their ability to bring out the people in the foreground.If you were listening to rock radio in the late 80s and early 90s, you almost certainly heard “Holy Diver” by Dio. (I personally prefer “Rainbow In The Dark,” but what can you do?) “Holy Diver” has a line that – probably unintentionally – sums up the music business:
“Between the velvet lies/ There’s a truth as hard as steel”
There are a LOT of “velvet lies” in the industry.
“It’s one huge party, all day and all night!”
Actually, it’s a lot of work and heartache.
“It’s a sea of money!”
Actually, it’s more like a black hole that eats money. And time. Also souls, in some cases. A dark, howling vortex of – yeah, you get the idea.
“Everybody will love you!”
Actually, a lot of people will hate you, talk trash, snipe at every little thing you do and say, and be filled with vicious envy for any success that you have. Also, the hate grows proportionally to your level of success. Don’t forget to smile!
I could go on.
The point is that there’s the popular portrayal, and then there’s the real thing.
The “velvet lies” don’t just apply for the surface elements, though. The deep, critical concepts of music as a career are just as subject to falsehood. In fact, these falsehoods that touch “the innermost workings” are the most entrenched lies and half truths you’ll find in the biz.
You know why they’re so profoundly embedded? It’s because they’re the lies that we, as music industry people, tell ourselves and each other. Over and over. For years.
One of the biggest ones has to do with getting paid – or, more correctly, WHY musicians get paid.
The Velvet Lie: Bands are paid to play music.
The Truth As Hard As Steel: Some bands are paid to play music. Most bands are paid to bring a crowd.
I understand that what I just said is uncomfortable. It may even have made you steaming mad. Before you run off, though, please hear me out. This isn’t a judgmental thing at all. Heck, I’ve believed this lie myself. What I think, though, is that once we’re over the initial sting of the truth, ceasing to lie to ourselves actually makes us a lot happier.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe.
Decades ago, music clubs were media outlets. Before the Internet was a household appliance, before there were a million TV channels, and before consumer video playback, high-value entertainment (that wasn’t TV) meant going to a physical place. If you wanted to hear new music, that meant going to a record store or going to a bar/ club/ theater/ whatever. If you just plain wanted to be social, that meant going to a bar or club.
As such, the music venues had something of a captive audience.
Actually, it was only the good venues. I’m convinced that there were a bunch of craptastic music clubs back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and they’ve just been forgotten or glossed over.
Anyway.
People went out to the clubs and bars because they wanted to be entertained in a way that they couldn’t be at home. The venue drew the crowd, and then paid bands to play music that entertained that crowd.
Yes – that’s correct. In that situation, the band WAS paid to play music. The bands that kept people happy and dancing, and that helped build the club’s reputation were booked more often and paid more coin. As far as I can tell, this is when the basic bar and club pay scales were formed.
What was also formed was the idea that bands in bars and clubs were paid to play music. At the time, this idea was true – or at least, true more often.
Now, though, fewer bars and clubs have a “capacity” captive audience. Just about every place has some regulars, but the “salad days” of your local venue being a media outlet are over. Still, there are situations where musicians are paid as providers of music. These situations are easy to identify. They occur…
If you want to boil this down to a universally applicable rule, this is about as close as I think you can get:
Musicians are paid as players of music when an event’s audience will be present for reasons independent of the music.
Okay. What does that mean?
Weddings. Birthday parties. Corporate events. Fashion shows. Festivals and conventions. Fireworks displays.
In all of these cases, the crowd’s primary interest is in something other than the provided music. Sure, the music may be an added sweetener – maybe even a very strong one – but the main purpose is something else. The event planner selects and books acts that they feel the event attendees will enjoy. Indeed, they may even choose an act that they hope will tip a “maybe” attendee towards being a “definite.” Even so, if there were no band there would still be an event. The implication, then, is another rule of thumb:
When the music provided is a secondary part of an event’s “draw,” a musician can rightly consider themselves a contractor who is entitled to guaranteed pay per hour or per appearance.
There are some music venues that CAN operate via this model. However, to the best of my knowledge they are a relative rarity. If you’re a musician who intends to play mostly in bars and clubs, then the assumption you should make is…
In these days of “superabundant” media, bars and clubs just aren’t THE destination anymore. To fight against this, bars and clubs bring in attractions.
The point of an attraction is that it attracts people. (Also, the first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.) If an attraction fails to bring patrons to the bar, club, or all-ages room, then it’s not much good as an attraction. That’s pretty obvious.
The thing is, though, that this change in the bar and club entertainment model was never explicitly communicated to the musicians. Heck, it was never explicitly communicated to the venue operators. I’ve been a venue operator, and I’ll tell you that a lot of things I did were essentially instinctual. It wasn’t until after the fact that I stopped to think about why things were the way they were.
So, anyway, the the no-longer-true idea that musicians in bars and clubs are paid to be musicians has hung around, caused misunderstandings, started fights, broken up friendships, and just generally made people unhappy. The “velvet lie” is so uncomfortable because it causes a mismatch between expectation and reality – the musician expects payment commensurate with their work as a musician, and the venue expects to pay in a manner commensurate with the act’s draw.
To avoid expectation mismatch with reality, I would thus propose the following:
When the music provided is the primary factor in an event’s “draw,” a musician can expect their pay to be proportionally scaled to their ability to attract attendees to a particular place.
Okay. Now you’re pissed at me, right?
Let me be clear.
I long for – THIRST for – a world where art has intrinsic value. I’ve made music myself. I make visual art myself. I believe that an artist’s time is valuable. I wish, and wish desperately, that any artistic work could be converted to a predictable amount of currency (or other buying power) at will. I hunger for a reality where the intrinsic value of human life is tangible at all times.
If I could build a venue where anyone could get booked, and everybody who was booked made enough money to live in luxury until they were booked again, I would do so without hesitation.
Unfortunately, all of us are stuck with the reality we have until that reality changes.
So, what can we do?
The main step is to stop cuddling up with velvet lies. For most of us, the hard truth is that the value of a musical act is based upon attractional power. This is a tough pill to swallow for folks in the small-venue world, but once the pill goes down it gets a bit easier to manage.
Another bit of salve for the sting is that, at the highest levels of success and stardom, value based on power as an attraction is still the norm. Huge artists that get paid a flat rate from, say, Live Nation, are paid that guarantee because their proven draw is enormous. The risk to the promoter is relatively small in a situation like that, especially if the promoter has a lot of other big-name acts on the roster. Fundamentally, this is exactly the same at all show scales. This brings me to a closing thought for this article:
When the music is the main attraction, a musician’s pay is based solely upon the tangible value brought to the venue, minus the overall risk that a payout presents to the operator.
That’s the reality of the small-venue world. It isn’t velvet-soft, but it is the truth.
When looking for shows, be choosy.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
(Fair warning – this post might start out with a particularly cranky tone, but that’s just to lay the groundwork for friendly advice and encouragement a bit farther down. All I ask is that you hear me out.)
I’m not currently the booking manager of any club, bar, or theater.
But when I was, I had a bad relationship with a particular kind of booking agent. I called them “Shotgunners.”
A Shotgunner was a booking agent or band member who had a “form e-mail” written up, and was sending out that e-mail to every venue in the path of their tour. The goal was to get “a show” (any show) when they were in Salt Lake, and so they half-blindly shot a bunch of messages into the general area. If they got multiple responses, that was great – they could choose a gig from the bunch. If they got one response, that was still okay, because they would have something to do that night.
For a good while, I responded personally to each Shotgunner. I saw it as doing the right thing, but as time went on the shotgun-booked shows turned out to be both poorly attended, not-fun-for-anyone affairs.
I started ignoring the Shotgunners entirely. Shotgunner emails were, on the whole, very easy to pick out from the worthwhile booking requests:
Everything I wrote about above was about how Shotgun booking affected me, but what I really want to focus on is you.
The musician who’s trying to build a fan base. The musician who wants to tour. The musician who wants to be heard. If you take nothing else away from this post, please take this:
Your music is worth so much more than a hasty e-mail that’s fired off and forgotten.
Read that again, if it hasn’t sunk in yet.
When you let a booking agent shotgun your info, or you shotgun booking requests yourself, you are doing yourself a disservice. You’re selling yourself short. You’re gathering up a big portfolio of shows that – for whatever reason – probably aren’t worth your time.
The fix for this issue is extraordinarily simple. All that has to be done is to trade the “shotgun” for an instrument of precision. In other words…
Book shows like a sniper.
Snipers are the folks who get called in to handle “high value” targets. Snipers become familiar with their quarries, figuring out what makes them tick. Snipers carefully maneuver into place, looking for the opportunity for the perfect shot. They are going to fire one bullet, and that bullet has to count.
(By the way, I’m not advocating for an adversarial relationship between musicians/ booking agents and venue bookers. This is all just a metaphor for focus and commitment.)
Booking like a sniper means taking your time on each individual show, taking the trouble to build a relationship with the venue, and taking care to have the long-term in view.
Shotgunning is a very tempting approach. It’s fast, and it seems easy – but remember how I talked about The Law of Conservation of Effort? Shotgunning saves a bit of time on one end, but all that time will have to be paid back later. It may even be paid back with “penalties.”
What I mean is that there’s a big payoff to spending the time necessary to really pin down a great show, in a room you definitely want to play, with clear understandings between the venue management and you.
“But it takes so much time!” you might be tempted to shout.
Believe me, I hear ya. Again, though, I have to hammer on The Law of Conservation of Effort. Let’s say you shotgun-book a whole ton of gigs. The law of averages will take care of some of them being good, no doubt. However, unless you’re really lucky, a lot of those shows won’t be worth much fun OR money. Even if they aren’t worth much, you still have to get everybody organized, practice, get everyone to the gig on time, load and unload your gear, play like you mean it, and then get “reset” for practice. Because the booking was done in haste, you might have had to renegotiate some things on the fly. You may get shuffled around in the lineup without any say-so. You might just get stiffed out of your share.
The gigs might be utter crap, and yet you still have to do a lot of work to make them happen.
At some point, doesn’t it just make sense to spend, say, a couple more hours on getting a few shows you really want, where all that effort is much more likely to be worth it?
Before I wrap up, I want to make one more point.
In my experience, what makes any particular show “high quality” or “worth it” can take a lot of forms. At some times, it will be all about how much money can be made. That’s not all there is, though.
I want to be absolutely clear that I think “fun factor” is a huge component of what makes a gig worthwhile. If you’re going to have a serious career, you will probably have to balance “fun” with “profit,” but it can be very easy to throw “fun” out unnecessarily. Every so often, you’ll run into a situation where the show is a genuine blast, but is financially weak.
Taking that date anyway is totally legitimate, so don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
Every so often, it’s perfectly okay to say, “The show will hardly pay anything, but that place has the most amazing [food, drink, hot waitress, view out the window, whatever]. Come on, we’ll get the gas money back, be out of the house, and just play the songs we like.” As long as you don’t run your career into the ground by doing this every show, you’re fine.
…and notice that the hypothetical gig has been well considered, with everybody knowing what to expect.
Book like a sniper.
The idea that more people show up because more money is spent on “broadcast” show promotion is false.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
I don’t know if anybody plays “Magic: The Gathering” any more, but that was the best metaphor I could think of.
Anyway.
There is a persistent myth in the music industry that more promotion = more concertgoers. This myth is untrue. (There are true myths, at least in my experience, but that’s a philosophical discussion for another time.)
Now, what IS true is that “the word” regarding an upcoming show does need to get out. Makes sense, right? If nobody knows about your upcoming gig, they probably aren’t going to show up. The problem is making the assumption that, just because someone knows about your gig, they WILL show up without fail. Of course, at an intuitive level, we know that’s not true. Even your best friends – people who love your music, or the venue, or whatever, don’t always turn up when given the opportunity.
For some reason, though, when it comes to marketing and promotion, we shut off this particular piece of knowledge and start acting like dollars and effort will force things to happen. As a result, money and effort is expended out of proportion to the returns it might bring. This leads to frustration, anger, and also less money for other things. Things like gear. And also food.
Fortunately, I think there’s a fix. The fix doesn’t solve the problem of people showing up, but it does solve our internal problem of believing a lie. The fix, like all troubleshooting, starts with understanding what’s broken.
A quote attributed to John Wanamaker goes like this: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Whether or not he actually said it, the quote illustrates the problem with advertising your show, album release, or anything else via traditional means. It’s hard to know if mass marketing is effective or not.
Traditional media is broadcast in nature. That is to say, it gets fired off into the public with no (or minimal) targeting. Sure, a publication, radio station, or TV production may have its own target audience, but the actual delivery medium effectively “radiates” to a general area. With the exception of their streaming services, TV and radio transmissions fly out with minimal directivity. Folks either tune in or don’t, but the signal still arrives at their location if they’re in range. That transmission power is lost if folks aren’t listening. The same analogy applies to print. Sure, The Salt Lake Tribune, SLUG, and The City Weekly target where they put their distribution stands. Even so, once the papers get to those stands, there’s no targeting at all. The “signal” is just out there, and you don’t immediately (sometimes ever) know if it reached any particular person or didn’t.
This is why traditional media advertises their advertising services the way they do. (So meta! It’s like a reflection of a reflection.) They say things like, “We reach thousands of people across the Wasatch Front. A percentage of these people buy from radio/ TV/ newspaper ads. Advertising with us works!”
Think about that last paragraph. Promotion via traditional media is a form of gambling. It’s really nothing more than a bet based on percentages – like Roulette, or Poker. If your product has a general appeal, then the percentage is in your favor. If your product is niche, then you’re making a risky bet.
Live music is a niche market. It’s not that there aren’t a lot of people who like to attend shows. The issue is that there usually aren’t a lot of people who want to attend YOUR show. So, just telling them that your show is out there isn’t going to turn them into a customer.
If you want to boil it down, you can say this:
Marketing and promotion is the process of gaining attention from the people who are already interested in buying what you’re selling. Marketing and promotion are NOT the process of magically turning people disinterested in your product into people interested in your product.
Let me lay a couple of examples of well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective marketing on you.
Of course, I recognize that two examples isn’t a huge sample size. At the same time, I feel that it’s representative of what’s going on.
So…watcha gonna do? Take heart! The news isn’t all bad. Actually, the news is pretty good.
The pretty-dang-good news is that you – yes YOU, you eating the sandwich over there – are your own media outlet now. (Remember my article about that?) On top of that, you’re not just a media outlet. You’re a laser-targeted media outlet.
Seriously.
If the marketing available to bands, artists, and venues were a guided munition, it would be able to home in on a target the size of a cell phone (not one of the big ones, either) in the dark, during a violent hurricane.
…and this isn’t because of studies. It’s not because of polling. It’s not because of statistical genius.
It’s because of social media.
There are a million lectures to be had about the power of social media, so there’s no need for me to repeat very much. What I will say is this:
As a musician, band, or anyone else involved in music, you have the unprecedented power of focusing your marketing efforts on people who have – effectively – declared directly that they are interested in what you’re selling. For this reason, you can get maximum results with a minimum of cost and effort. You just have to give yourself permission.
You don’t have to throw money at traditional media, hoping that someone might listen. You have Facebook likes. You have Twitter followers. You have people who look at your pictures on Instagram. You have people who have decided to listen to you, and you know who they are. Right now.
Yes, I know that capturing the attention of those folks is an issue. That piece of the discussion is beyond the scope of this article, although you might want to check into the resources that Carlos Castillo posts.
The upshot? Spend your precious money and energy on reaching the people that you know are already interested in some demonstrable way. Actually, because social media is effectively subsidized, you only have to directly spend energy. Ask the people who have already taken the trouble to “declare for you” to pass the word. Only some of them will, but the end result is still more effective than throwing a message into the howling, black vortex of broadcast media…and then hoping for the best.
Then, once you’ve reached out to the people who have already said that they want to listen, stop.
Stop.
I mean it.
Give yourself permission to quit promoting after you’ve done all that will actually be effective.
It’s really hard, surprisingly, so make sure to practice.
Even in the music business, which is supposedly a very free-love, touchy-feely sort of place, there’s this incredible undercurrent of having to do an “acceptable” amount of work on a show. The undercurrent is so strong that people will actually spend time and money that they shouldn’t, doing things that don’t actually work, all to satisfy that sense that there’s a certain amount of “tired and used up” that must be achieved before something becomes legitimate. It’s all part of the competition based on work that I’ve come to deeply dislike.
I urge you not to do things that are ineffective simply to say that you’ve done them.
Do what matters, and then move on. Give yourself permission. Even better – give others you’re working with, like bands on the same bill, and the venue you’re playing at, permission to stop after they’ve done what works.
…and keep track of what works. Flyering (which is a form of broadcast media, I assure you) isn’t something that I see as working very much. However, if you can positively determine that it’s effective for you, with real numbers to back up your conclusions, then go for it! If nobody that follows you on Twitter is actually interested in your shows, then don’t sink a lot of time into marketing your shows on Twitter. If Facebook does everything you need, post to Facebook and then let things ride. Do what works for you, and avoid being lazy, but also recognize that all you have to do to avoid being lazy is to do what’s actually enough. Adding on a bunch of useless activity is just getting tired for the purpose of internal bonus points.
Marketing and promotion for shows isn’t magic. It doesn’t conjure an audience out of thin air. If you’ve done what you can, you’ve done what you can.