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Chapter Seven of Grow Your Band’s Audience, as published in January 2002.

Time for some detective work before we move to the next step. You’ve already peeked at a finished card, so you should know what’s next.

At the bottom and on the back of each card, jot down EVERY piece of information that you can about that venue. Who pours the drinks there? Who books the shows? Who writes the checks? What bands have played there in the past few months? Who booked those gigs?

You’re building a very simple contact information database. Some folks like to use automated solutions like ACT or Outlook or Goldmine. Those pieces of software will let you do crazy cool things like keep a log of every call you make and every letter you send. If you haven’t got the money or the hardware for that kind of system, keeping track of all these things on your set of index cards will do just fine.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You’ve identified your perfect gig and your perfect venue, and that helped you get a really, really clear picture of the audience you’ll see at your future shows. As we get ready to move to step two, I want you to think some more about your perfect gig’s audience, and about how they got to that gig in the first place.

EXERCISE

Remember how you felt when you were visualizing your perfect gig? Could you feel the energy of all those people in the room, who came out just to see you?

I’m going to ask you to visualize some more scenes with the folks in that crowd.

Pick someone from your most wanted list and imagine yourself in their shoes. How did they find out about that perfect gig? Picture, in your mind, what they were doing when they found out about your show. Was someone telling them about you around the office water cooler? Were they reading an article about you in the newspaper? Did a friend of theirs call them up on the phone to tell them about you?

Write down, now, three ways in which your “most wanted” audience member heard about you and your gig.

For each of those events that you just imagined, I want you to describe the person who told your “most wanted” audience member about you. Is it a fellow worker with a great hunger for live music? Is it a newspaper writer who loves to discover new bands?

Who do you think are the people who will tell your perfect audience members about you or your gig?

And, more importantly, what made that person want to share the news about you?

Now that you’ve met some members of your perfect audience, you can start to see that to attract them, you must start working through the network of friends and contacts with whom they’ve surrounded themselves. Identifying the people who can help you reach your audience is our very important second step on your way to growing your band’s audience.