Grow Your Audience - Step 2: Who Can Help You?
Welcome back to our series of tips for new and emerging professional musicians. In our last installment, we looked at how you can get to know your audience - before you've actually met them. Now it's time to enlist the aid of some willing participants in your dream.
Five groups of people can help you get your music into the ears of the right audience. I've listed them in the order in which you'll usually encounter them:
1. Club people 2. Press people 3. Radio people 4. Record people 5. People people
No matter what...
Please, whatever you do, don't read these descriptions as invitations to blanket your state liberally with publicity material.
In all of these cases, we'll look at how you can get these people on your team. And in all of these cases, we'll emphasize how important it is to help these people get their own needs met. And remember throughout this process that you should never ask for a gig or a slot "because the music's good" or "because people will want to hear this." Follow me, and I'll show you what I mean...
Step One - Join the Club
Plenty of folks have written books and seminars on how to get your music noticed by club owners. If there were a magic potion, or a universal rule, we'd be selling it in bottles, that's for sure. Remember our exercise from last week? By now, you should have staked out a few good venues for your music. Here's how to get to the next level...
People that book gigs at clubs have one universal need: TO SPEND AS LITTLE MONEY AS POSSIBLE TO PACK A ROOM FULL OF PEOPLE WHO WILL DRINK and/or EAT. Sure, some bookers who are a step or two higher on Maslow's Scale will tell you about their mission or their editorial standards. But at the end of the day, it's all about the cash in the till.
The easiest way to a club owner's heart: send a brief note of introduction with your best demo tape. In the note, offer yourself up as an opening act, as happy hour entertainment, or as ambience on an otherwise slow night. Don't talk about money. Instead, make sure the booker knows that you'll bring as many as 50 patrons with you to the gig. (If everybody buys one beer, even the hardest-hearted club owner will find respect for you.)
Once you book the gig, get on the phone and round up two dozen people who've owed you favors since you were born. This is not something you should do over e-mail - this requires personal pleas in your own voice. Make sure everyone you call can bring one or two more people, tell them that it would really, really help you out if they would each buy something at the bar during the gig. A beer, a soda, a bag of pretzels, anything. Promise liner note "thank you" messages like they were pre-IPO tech stock options. Buy everyone a round yourself if you have to.
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