Mind Your Music Business: 6 Tips To Getting Your Band Booked

During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the live music industry suffered dreadfully. While all of the music scene was locked away to fiddle on their guitars and stuck in their home studios, the Gable Music Ventures crew thought it a great opportunity to create a vlog series clueing artists in on some of the basics of conducting good music business. Now that the venues are booking and bands are back to releasing music, we decided to hit replay on the channel to help our musician readers along their musical journeys. 

Here are 6 Tips to apply so you can ensure your emails are getting answered and you’re booking shows!

Social Media

In the age of technology, if you’re not online somewhere, you don’t exist. As harsh as it might sound, any professional artist making even a sliver of their income from gigs will tell you a little online presence goes a long way. It takes little to no effort to create a Facebook page and invite your friends and family to like it. If time is of the essence for you consider using a third party apps to link your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts together so you can schedule content and save time and energy.

Demo

If you’re just getting started, it's ok that you don’t have a high production full length album. But if you have a phone or even a field recorder, it's in your best interest to have something on SoundCloud or Bandcamp. Both of those will host your music for free, and you can mark the track as a demo recording so everyone knows it’s not necessarily the “real deal”.  This will help venues, talent buyers, bookers and even blogs know what kind of music you’re playing. 

Video

Something we get asked by clients as a booking agency is to provide a video or clip of a band performing. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to pass over a band for a venue or event because they didn’t have any good live performance videos for us to pass along. Any smartphone can take a basic video. Set up your phone to record a video during a jam session or band practice for a little content that can go a long way.

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 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. It doesn’t need to be AudioTree studio session live quality but you want to get across the general idea of what your band is like on stage. 

Networking/Doing Your Research

Find the bands and venues in your area and like their pages, and 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. The musical community is very close and very tight knit. Just like most industries, people would rather work with people they know or who come recommended by someone they trust. 

Start Small

As a freshly emerging artist who’s building their fanbase you don’t want to promise more than you can deliver to a venue or talent buyer. 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 then they move to a bigger venue, they will remember that and you will be overlooked.

Respond Same Day

Talent buyers, booking agents, and 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 about it and include music and video links (Not FILES but LINKS), and at least one of your social media accounts. Bookers and venues love when you make it easy for them. 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 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 include 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.