Mind Your Music Business: How To Get Your Band Booked

So you’ve got a band together, you’ve written some songs, and you practiced. Now what? It’s time to play a show. I’m going to give you 6 basic things you can do to ensure your emails are getting answered and you’re booking shows!

Online Presence

In today’s modern world if you’re not online somewhere you don’t exist to music venues. It takes little effort to create a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account and invite your friends and family to like and follow it. You’ll quickly come to realize that the benefits are invaluable. 

With advances in these apps like Meta Business Suite, there are ways to schedule content ahead of time and across multiple platforms saving you time and energy. 

Quick Tip: You can curate what you post to each site depending on what works best for each platform. Links are best on Twitter, events are great for Facebook, and pictures are best for Instagram. Also, venues and talent buyers and bookers pay very close attention to what you post and your engagement with fans on these sites. 

Demo

If you’re just getting started it's ok that you don’t have a high-production, full-length album streaming on Spotify, but if you have a phone or a field recorder it's preferable to have a sample of your music somewhere online. Sites like YouTube, Soundcloud, or Bandcamp host your music for free and you can mark it as a demo recording so everyone knows it’s not necessarily the “real deal” but it will help venues, talent buyers, bookers and even blogs know what kind of music you’re playing. 

Picking a genre can give you the ‘ick’, but it shouldn't be overlooked, as it is an important way for potential fans and venues to find you. It helps you build an audience and gives you an edge when it comes to marketing your music to the industry. 

(MONTE band member; Photo credit Moonloop Photography)

Video

For bands breaking into the scene and making a name for themselves, it can be hard to convince a venue or talent buyer that you have a solid live performance. Even before you spend money on a high-end live session, you can easily grab some footage at an open mic, sitting in your room, or even footage from a live stream saved for later use. 

Quick tip: for videos, practice getting the best possible audio. Pick a good room with good acoustics, play around with the volumes of the instruments, set the camera or phone up in different locations in the room. If the audio is ‘bad bad bad’ people tend to not want to watch, so it’s worth it in the long run to take a little extra time with this one.

Networking/Do your research

Networking is especially important if you’re going directly to a venue and not using a booking agency. The musical community is very close and very tight knit. Just like in most industries, people would rather work with people they know or who come recommended by someone they trust. The first shows many people play are at the bars down the street from their house and/or online ups with friends bands. Find the bands and venues in your area and like their pages, interact with them digitally by commenting, liking and sharing their posts. Who’s hosting live streams? Are they featuring bands with a similar style and genre as you? Make every move count.

Start Small

Booking shows as a freshly emerging artist who’s building their fanbase, you don’t want to promise more than you can deliver. If a venue requires that you can bring 40-50 people but you don’t even know if you can bring 5-10 don't lie about it. They will remember that and you will not get booked there again. Talent buyers tend to move around different venues and sometimes book more than one venue, so if they book you at a small venue and you exaggerated your draw, if they move to a bigger venue they will remember that and you will be overlooked. Play the dive bars or special events for a while to build your fanbase with little pressure and overhead.

(Hepner’s Rebellion; Photo credit Nathalie Antonov)

Respond Same Day

Talent buyers, booking agents, clients all want to be done with this whole messy process of scouting, emailing, and booking as quickly as possible. Whenever you send an email out to them or respond, be as quick as you can. Include links to your videos, music, any press, and your most popular social media platform.

Bookers and venues love when you make it easy for them and don’t want to have to search for anything. They’ll actually remember moving forward that you're someone who responds quickly and you might get opportunities sent to you before other artists who aren’t as reliable in communication. If they reach out to you with a date, but you have to get the ok from your drummer or your piano player, that's ok. Let them know you’re going to check with your band ASAP and give them a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response the same day they email you. You don’t want to leave people hanging and just a few hours' response time could be the difference between you getting and not getting that gig. 

Quick tip: If you’re sending emails to a booking agent or a venue, make the subject of your email, ‘the band name, the venue and the date you want to be booked’. It makes it a lot easier for the entire process on both ends when you have a specific date in mind and put it in your heading. Keep those emails short and sweet.