This usually means getting poor gigs with bands that don't compliment each other for ages while you build your own fan base playing gigs at the low end of the gigging circuit. Overall you are working at a disadvantage.
Become Your Own Promoter
The obvious solution is to become a promoter and run your own gigs. Hire a hall or small venue and sell tickets to make your money back, hopefully with some profit.
Pros and Cons of Being You Own Promoter
Pros
- You stand to gain experience gigging
- You get to grow your fan list / mailing list
- You have an opportunity to make some money
- You learn more about how the music industry works
- You have more control
Cons
- You have to work
- You have to Learn
- You have to use your imagination and creativity
- You have to put your money and time where your mouth is
Costs
Typically you might have to pay for:
- Venue hire
- PA System hire
- Lighting hire
- Ticket Printing
- Fliers and Poster Printing and Posting and Distribution
Some venues will be happy to let you rent some or all of the venue at no cost. They will just be glad to see their venue busy. Others will insist on payment. Some venues may supply lights and PA, even an engineer to work them, other halls will provide nothing at all. You might have the gear to print up your own tickets and posters.
You might also want to find places that will sell your tickets. They will take a percentage commission and will want to know what you are doing to promote your gig.
You should be able to do this a few times before the whole friends family thing begins to tail off. By then you should have a hundred or so people on your fans mailing list, more than enough to recover the cost of hiring many venues (remember many venues you can get for nothing).
Spreading The Financial Risk
If you are confident enough in your own playing ability, take the step of being your own promoter. Of course you can take this further and create events with multi-band line ups. You get other bands to play on the same bill and take on responsibility for some tickets. This has several advantages:
- You pick the venue
- You pick the support bands
- You spread the risk of selling enough tickets
- You get the opportunity to put your music in front of some new potential fans
Spreading the risk is a fairly straight forward thing. You want other bands to bring along their fans. if you just give them tickets they may sell a lot because it's pure profit. Alternatively you could sell your tickets to other bands at a reduced rate. This encourages them to sell more if they want to make decent money. From your stand point this gives you money to go towards your costs.
Setting up the gig is just part of it. The other main parts are promoting your gig and selling tickets.
Promoting Your Gig
This is a pretty large topic on it's own so I'll only touch on the basics here and leave some more detail for another article.
There are lots of ways to promote your gig. There are a few core groups of businesses and people you will work with:
- Local Press
- Music Press
- Radio
- Internet Radio
- Friends
Here you can approach all of these groups from two perspectives.
- A Promoter
- An Act
Write up press releases, there are plenty of online guides for writing a press release including "Guidlines For Writing A Press Release" on Songstuff.com. Put together an Electronic Press Kit, and a real-world Press Kit to provide the press with suitable background information. Check out my earlier article "Create A Killer Electronic Press Kit (EPK)" for some advice on creating an EPK. A real-world kit contains much the same information, only the medium for presentation is different.
Friends are useful, both real world and on the internet. They can help you spread the word. Word of mouth is a great way to get new fans and a pretty good way to sell tickets too. A quick message can be sent to their social network friends. You can even offer to write a basic post that they can customize. Friends may also be willing to help with fliers and posters.
Selling Tickets
Even if you sell tickets to friends and family that could be quite a few tickets. they bring friends etc too and everyone who sees you is a potential fan.
Having a music shop or ticket center willing to sell your tickets is very useful. Any deal will be a negotiation, but the advantages are many. For start people will know where to go (your poster and flier and radio listings will tell them where tickets are available) to get tickets without you needing to be there. Ticket centers in particular are experts at selling tickets and may be willing to offer more of a push for a larger percentage.
Offer bands on your bill tickets at between 70 % to 30% of the face price, they commit to a number of tickets that you stipulate (part of the deal when you sign them up). The percentage will be decided by how many they will commit to, what percentage of overall tickets that is and how much you need to recoup in order to pay your costs. If they commit to a low percentage of the overall seats then they pay more per ticket. Either way they owe you that whether they sell the tickets or not. It is an incentive for them to make money and to get more people to the gig. Ideally you want to be bringing more fans than all the other bands on the bill added together.
If you are the only band on the bill that might seem obviously not an option, but in essence all the band is is an "affiliate". So you could try recruiting "affiliates" locally and / or online. Same deal, they sell tickets they get a commission, the more tickets they sell the higher percentage profit per ticket they will make. This can be a good way to leverage friends of friends, and their friends too.
Grow and Make The Most Of Your Fan Base
Take along a pad and pen and try to get people to sign up to your mailing list with their email address at the gig. Even better would be to do that using a laptop and an online form. One mistake bands make time after time is to neglect their fans. A mailing list of fans is an ideal way to directly contact fans to let them know about upcoming gigs etc. but they are useful in many other ways too.
Getting more people to sign up to your fan list is so, so important. Have people at your gig dedicated to this task alone. They should not sit and stare, they should be actively encouraging people to sign up, so use anyone with good sales skills in this job.
Remember merchandise is effectively an advertisement, a little reminder of your existance in a fan's daily life, so make sure you take along any recordings and merch you have for sale.
Conclusion
My advice is to always put on a better show than most would expect for a particular venue. People will come away more impressed and with the feeling you should have been on a bigger and better stage.
All this gives you fans, track history, and experience which you can use to get on the main gigging circuit, but I would still continue running my own shows like the way I just described, after all it is what big bands do. My two cents is, if you want what big bands have, do what big bands do.
Any money of course that is left over can be stashed away in your band account. "Of course!" I hear you all say...
