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Bring Your Own Crowd, How to build a fan base
Bring Your Own Crowd, How to build a fan base
Date Posted: June 25 2010
Written By: Brendan Alviani
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Bring Your Own Crowd
by Brendan Alviani
It’s Friday night. Your band has packed up your instruments, driven to your venue, hauled your gear, done your soundcheck and are ready to win over any audience. Unfortunately, that “audience” mostly consists of empty chairs. Sound familiar?
Well, as venue-owners, we’ve seen a lot of this. We don’t need to tell you how disappointing—emotionally, financially, and professionally—it can be for you.
Yet, we’re constantly amazed by the number of artists who book months in advance, but don’t do a thing until they stroll in to play Friday night. Perhaps these bands post the date on their MySpace page, but it seems they expect the venue to do 100% of the promotion. Although luck and extenuating circumstances certainly play a role—some bands don’t have to work to get a great audience, while others bust their butts for a mediocre turn-out—we can usually tell pretty easily who has done their “homework.”
In my opinion, it’s in the self-interest of the band to do at least some of the promotion themselves. It’s also the opinion of Michael Kelsey, one musician who consistently packs the room. A full-time professional guitarist for 17 years, he’s got quite a system. I recently sat down with him to present a spectrum of things to consider for upping your game. In future articles, we’ll be hashing out some tips and tricks about email lists.
Then, Michael is going to share some of his secrets for establishing a “stomping ground.” Today, however, I’d like to make a case for why you should take that first step and care about self-promotion.
Your Incentives
“It’s not the venue’s responsibility to bring a crowd,” says Kelsey. “They’re trying to help me, just like I’m trying to help them. If no one shows up, then why should the business owners pay me like they did? So I have to work to get people in the door.”
And boy does he ever. It’s no accident that Michael Kelsey can consistently pack the house at Family Piano Co. and other venues. Driving from Indiana, he recently brought nearly 70 people from at least 3 counties to a Thursday-night show. “I usually spend 2-3 hours a day doing ‘business:’ writing emails, researching venues, figuring out logistics, booking, promotion, maintaining my equipment, etc.” You can check out his website at michaelkelsey.com.
Regardless of whether you can prove in a court of law, beyond a doubt, that it’s the venue’s responsibility to promote a show, you’ve probably still got several incentives to do some of the promotion yourself. If you get enough of a reward for your efforts, why not?
First and foremost, there’s the tangible difference in the energy and vibe of the audience. Obviously, this can be pretty worthwhile for you as a performer, but also for the venue—more happy customers and more drinks bought. “I try to make my relationships with the bars win-win,” says Kelsey. The music business is based on relationships, which are all about contributing and working for win-win solutions. For me, it’s analogous to paddling a canoe together.
Of course, there’s also the financial side. Most venues I know pay the artist based how many people walk through the door, so your wallet can directly see the results of your efforts. This is especially true for places that have to “recoup” their costs before paying out, since those later customers give you a higher profit margin. An extra twenty or thirty people per show can quickly add up.
The Venue Cares
Of course, the venue also has an incentive to promote your show. Here’s how we see it. At Family Piano Co, we like to have lots of happy concert-goers; hopefully, they’ll become REGULAR happy concert-goers. Then next time, they might bring some friends, who in turn, might bring some friends. Both musicians and music stores will do better in a community that loves live music.
There’s value in musicians bringing potential customers in through out door; that’s why we do what we can to promote our artists. We email out a weekly professional newsletter detailing the upcoming concerts, so to drum up interest (much more on that in a later article). We put up fliers, talk to customers about the shows, and advertise them in newspapers like Chicago Jazz Magazine. We even sometimes film concerts and edit them into promotional videos for free, so that we—as well as the artist—can use this to “hook” new listeners into attending their concerts.
Yet, there is a very real limit to what we can do. When paying staff by the hour, promotional efforts can quickly add up— especially since we give the artists 100% of the door. Venues with alcohol also have a better recourse for recouping their money; coffee and snacks help, but can’t support the venue AND the musicians. Since we’re essentially picking all the “low-hanging fruit” that we can see, we don’t pursue other advertising activities; they involve much more effort for much less result.
Plus, there’s fan-base fatigue. We strive to provide artists plenty of opportunities to perform (and make money), so we have concerts almost every Friday. We send out a weekly email so that our customers are kept in the loop, but our computer statistics show a distinct drop in the number of our emails actually opened and read over the course of a concert season.yLet’s face it: to go to the same place every week, year in and year out, is more hard-core than anyone’s typical customer.
Not all venues do this much promotion; I’ll let you speculate whether that’s because of “laziness/ cheapness” or because they such a great reputation that they simply don’t need to. But every venue will have limits. If you want to do better than average, you probably have to do more than the bare minimum.
Coming Up
If this article has you riled up and ready to start self-promoting (like I am at this very moment), then don’t miss next issue. Michael Kelsey, others, and I will all share our hard-earned insights about the art and science of building a good email database of fans.
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