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Chapter One of Grow Your Band’s Audience, originally published in January 2002.

For about six years, I worked as a producer on a fantastic public radio series called World Café. I look back on my time there as if it were split into two equal cycles.

In the first three-year cycle, I pretty much sat back and gawked at the bands that rolled in every day - we’d record five or six sessions every week. I had just arrived from a stint in broadcast journalism, and it was a nice change to find myself in a cozy little studio with the folks who populated my already-hefty CD collection.

No matter what part of the world they hailed from, each act fell into one of three, easy-to-distinguish categories:

1. A young, upstart singer songwriter with a guitar. They might be a recent addition to a major label, or a regional artist with a strong independent release. Once in a while, a temp receptionist would give them an internship application to fill out before realizing that they were really there to perform on that day’s show. (A few actually filled out the application!)

2. A frenetic major label touring act. These would arrive in a big tour bus, and the studio would quickly fill up with instruments and leather-jacketed record company representatives on cell phones.

3. A wizened, living-in-the-van touring act. These were always my favorite, because they were almost always folks who had a major hit in their early career, who managed to hang on to their audience and make a living by roaming from town to town.

In those first three years, I got used to anticipating the specific needs for each of these groups (lunch - on me - for the first, room-temperature bottled water for the second, free use of an empty office and a phone for the third).

When I got into my second three-year cycle at World Café, I noticed something interesting. All of the artists in the third group - the hard touring, cheap living crew - would come back about once a year with a new tour or a new project. A handful of the folks from groups one and two would transfer over to that third group, usually with some harrowing story about how they escaped some awful international conglomerate. But I wouldn’t see very many people from those first two groups ever again.

They’d been replaced.

The record company folks, who were often the same, would tell me stories. Sometimes, artists would burn out on the road.

Sometimes, they would take time off to start a family. But most of the time, these folks ended up back at their old jobs - working in a cubicle, or selling shoes - because the Industry decided they’d never make it.

That made me sad.

At about the same time, I met a wonderful woman who - amazingly - would someday allow me to marry her.

We love to see live music. We go to a LOT of concerts every year, and we enjoy every type of music you can imagine.

A few of our early dates were at a handful of neighborhood hangouts where cover bands packed the house every night. At the time, I had been spending so much time around songwriters, I’d almost forgotten there was still a market for cover music in our city.

Boy, was I wrong!

The cover bands would pack in about four or five hundred folks. Each customer paid about five bucks’ cover, which the bar owners usually split down the middle with the bands. (Do the math!) The singer-songwriters I was used to hanging out with were getting really excited when thirty people showed up to a FREE gig!

What were the cover bands doing that the original songwriters weren’t?

I spent the next two years talking to all kinds of musicians, club owners, record and radio folks, and just about anyone who touches the music industry to find out why these cover bands were making a killing and emerging artists couldn’t even get arrested.

It goes a LOT deeper than just the audience’s familiarity with the music - the fans with whom I spoke knew precisely which cover bands sounded the best, which had original music side projects, and which had major recording contracts in Holland.

I only found one REAL difference: the cover bands approached their career as a BUSINESS. They weren’t afraid to use techniques you’d expect to see inside the conference rooms of places like Microsoft or Sears.

Meanwhile, the emerging songwriters were holding out for Someone Big to come along and patronize their work. They’d wait and wait for a Sony or a Universal to write a big advance check and take care of all the dirty work. In the few cases where Someone Big DID come along, the conglomerate usually dumped the artists back at the mall where they found them, saddling them with a “red card” to keep them out of the game for a while.

The folks who were REALLY succeeding, though, were those hard core touring acts. They combined the work ethic and the business sense of the cover bands with the artistic ability to churn out compelling new songs every year. Most importantly, they got their day-to-day needs met. Their impoverished-looking tour vehicles masked the fact that these artists were sitting on gobs and gobs of investments and royalties.

That third group - the artists who welded the best business and artistic traits with a strong sense of self-fulfillment and frugality - found a way to make a living making music. And they often succeeded DESPITE the fact that they weren’t on major labels, DESPITE the fact that the mainstream press wouldn’t give them the time of day, and DESPITE the fact that folks on the street couldn’t pick them out of a crowd. Fame might have fled, but these folks found something better - long term financial security and a deep sense of personal fulfillment.

In the past twelve months, we’ve distilled the experience and the advice of this group of artists into an action plan for success. If you’re just beginning to play out, you can use the tools in this book to get to what we call your “perfect gig” in about a year. Along the way, you’ll learn a lot of the music industry’s dirty little secrets, and I hope you’ll discover more about your own needs and wants.

The fact that you’ve got this book in your hands not only shows me that you’re serious about sharing yourself and your work with the world, but also that you’re sensible enough to keep yourself out of the poorhouse while you’re doing it.

Next Chapter: How to Use this Book