Steel City Coffee House has grown into a Phoenixville institution. The first time I was there, about eight or nine years ago, it had developed a reputation as the best place in the outlying Philly ‘burbs to see a real blend of singer-songwriters and eclectic musicians.

Today’s headline that the owner has sold the shop to one of her employees marks a welcome passage, especially since everyone seems to be following their passion. The now-former owner stays on as the booking agent, while investing in a coffee house that has to grow its daytime food business to survive.

If I were trying to book one of my acts at that venue today, I’d be trying to figure out how I could help them expand their lunchtime crowd. They’re already pulling consistent crowds to night-time gigs that feature national acts. Finding ways to help venues like this in places where they really need the help can endear you to owners and talent buyers.

A Coffeehouse Changes Hands originally appeared on spinme.com on June 30, 2010. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Every time I write about booking shows on college campuses, I get two kinds of e-mail. One burst of e-mail comes from artists who are so frustrated about how difficult it is to nail down dates through college activities boards, especially at schools who belong to the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA). The other burst comes from college talent buyers bemoaning the fact that they’re usually undergrads who have very little time to sift through the hundreds of submissions they receive every semester.

It’s been a while since I’ve covered the topic, but a post by Steven Kent at WalletPop revived the issue for me, especially as colleges target live music in their cost-cutting measures.

Getting folks to agree on who should get booked on campus is never easy. It wasn’t easy when I was in school. It won’t be easy when my nieces’ grandkids go to college, either. If your school has a really forward thinking activities board, it probably funds a few different teams of talent buyers to pull in a diverse roster of talent. If your school’s like most, however, you’ve got a couple of very stressed-out folks who think they’re doing a great job if they can allocate the year’s music budget as fast as possible.

That’s where NACA comes in. NACA events are like mini-SXSW conventions, designed to expose college talent buyers to as many potential live performers as possible in a short amount of time. Plus, there’s booze.

If you’re great at networking in person, getting into a NACA event can help you connect with talent buyers before they blow their budgets for the school year. However, there’s a new wrinkle: block-booking.

Let’s say you’re a B-list or C-list act and you’ve got a very smart booking agent who’s a member of NACA. She can get into the regional conference and offer some significant discounts for colleges that sign on to your preferred routing schedule. Tightening up your routing is something I wrote about in More Gigs Now, and it’s a great way to keep your touring costs low. A tight, three-week schedule of four campuses per week can net you a lot of cash with minimal expenses. Passing along your savings to college talent buyers makes your act significantly more attractive.

If you’re worried that block-booking by agencies and talent groups is costing you some on-campus gigs, learn how to fight fire with fire. In GYBA and MGN, I wrote about gig swaps and gig circuits. Teaming up with similar acts in a region not only keeps your overhead low, it spreads out the workload of booking and promoting gigs. Packaging 3-4 acts as a touring showcase makes your pitch much more digestible to college talent buyers, makes you look more professional, and makes it much more likely that you’ll get picked up for a block-booked string of shows.

Even better, if your gig circuit team enrolls a single booker/representative in NACA, you’ll save significant membership and promotion costs. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get booked — that’s going to be up to the person you send to the next NACA event. But you’ll have a far better chance of getting college gigs than if you go it alone.

[ photo credit: "Rainy Day Blues" by Flickr user David Clow, used under CC license ]

NACA Schools Block-Booking Live Music originally appeared on spinme.com on June 1, 2010. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

I’m sick of articles that contain the phrase, “during these tough times.” (Sick of writing them. Sick of reading them.)

Many of my contacts in the booking business have freaked out about receipts this year. When jobs are on the line and gas prices rise above $2 per gallons, live entertainment is one of the first things that gets slashed from the budget. If you’ve been sweating it out this summer, watching venues fold up as fast as your fans’ wallets, think about how you can stand in service to your audience.

Can you host your own concert at a park or a community center? How about a private house concert for a handful of your most consistent supporters?

Remember to avoid “free” concerts — your core audience won’t value them as much as they will if you promote the gig as a “recession-buster” or an “entertainment stimulus package.”

Here’s where you enjoy the biggest opportunity right now… If your perfect audience member doesn’t want to spend $50 to see their favorite area act, can you redirect them to see YOU play live for $10? They’ll get a great live experience that they’ll value even more — because you turned it into a transcendent experience for them. And then, when times get good again, they’ll still be on board to support you through your own bigger gigs.

During tough times, make time for more fun. originally appeared on spinme.com on July 2, 2009. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

I’ve been wanting to write some new articles about booking concerts. It seems like we’re in another cycle where folks ask me questions like, “now that we have Twitter and Facebook, it should be totally easy to find a booking agent, right?” (Three years ago, it was, “now that we have MySpace…” Before that, it was “MP3.com…” and before that, it was “AOL…”)

Booking agents are important to making the leap into making money from your music. But there are some reasons booking agents are so hard to find. I’ll be writing about those reasons over the next few weeks.

While those notes come together, I wanted to point back at the great interview that Scott Andrew did with Mary McFaul, an experienced music manager, booking agent, and music consultant…

5 Questions with Mary McFaul

RETRO: Booking Agents and Music Managers originally appeared on spinme.com on March 18, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Many of my friends and colleagues have gravitated into the country music space over the past few years. It makes sense, given that Nashville is probably the last stronghold of the traditional music business model that relies on teams of writers, producers, artists, and marketers to make things happen. In so many ways, country is the new “pop” music for so many Americans.

Unfortunately, there’s a gaping hole in the live country music market throughout the nation. Most potential concertgoers still think that a typical “country venue” looks like the roadhouse where Jake and Elwood had to perform behind chicken wire in The Blues Brothers. At a Nashville music conference a few years back, I showed a slide of the CGBG restroom and warned folks that music audiences were tired of venues that didn’t make them feel comfortable. It’s an even more important message for country musicians to hear, since so many concertgoers love the music but worry that they’re going to have to put on spurs or a big hat just to fit in at a country music venue.

So, it was neat to see a feature piece about a new club in Fort Wayne, Indiana called the Neon Armadillo. The ‘Dillo, as regulars like to call it, is a hybrid bar/restaurant/listening room with a strong country slant. By the looks of their MySpace page, the owner’s building a strong following of audience members who love country music but want a clean, fun environment with a good sound system.

When singer/songwriter listening rooms were evolving in the 90s, I remember talent bookers worrying that certain artists would drift from folk through Americana and straight off into country. The fear was that cliche songs about breakups, dogs, and pickups would kill the yuppie vibe that the rooms needed to stay financially afloat. Now, yuppies love country music. But venues in so many towns are struggling with the concept that a country music listening room can be so much more than just a dive bar. Watching how the Dillo performs over the next few years will be a good indicator of how this trend plays out.

Neon Armadillo: Redefining Live Country Music originally appeared on spinme.com on March 17, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Listen to this great description of how one listener uses and enjoys iMix selections from the Apple iTunes Music Store. People in America used to use radio and mixtapes for that kind of experience, but now they turn to other listeners online.

So here’s one suggestion to boost sales of your music while growing your audience.

Think about the ways that your current listeners have told you they use your music. Has a song of yours gotten someone over a break-up? Do people use your songs for working out? Anybody get a speeding ticket listening to your stuff?

Think about the activity that someone might be doing while listening to one of your songs. Then, build a playist of familiar music around your song. It’s a great way to slip your music unsuspectingly into the iPods of new listeners.

Technorati Tags: music+business, iPod, iTunes, iMix, playlists, mixtapes

Listeners Use Your Music in Context — How You Can Spread Your Own Music Using iMixes originally appeared on spinme.com on September 12, 2006. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Instead of selling every seat in the house for $30, INXS recently staged an auction on Ticketmaster. The highest priced ticket sold for $500, the lowest for $3. Nine Inch Nails used a similar model, and watched online scalping drop substantially. Venues and ticket sellers are finally clued in to the idea that pricing for many concerts should be on a bell curve instead of a fixed line. Many superfans are willing to pay top dollar to sit down front, while other folks would be more willing to check out a show if it were, say, $10 instead of $40.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has more details [ subscription req'd ].

What does this mean for independent musicians?

As I talk about in More Gigs Now and in my seminars on the zone booking strategy, it’s more important for your long term success to book a sold out show in a smaller venue than leave seats empty in larger venues — even if that means you make a little less money.

Sold out shows are electric, and they create scarcity in your market. Selling out a show tells your audience that they’ve got to act quickly — and creates a built-in market for your next show in the same zone or the same market.

Flexible pricing takes that to the next level. By offering tickets to fans at every conceivable price level without resorting to giving tickets away or leaving seats empty, everybody wins. You get a sold out show, and every member of your audience feels like they got great value for what they were willing to pay. Most importantly, as Tim McGraw’s manager points out in the WSJ article, artists — not scalpers — get to keep the additional revenue that fans are willing to pay.

Of course, we should all wish for the problem of having scalpers in the first place, right? So, keep focusing on booking small shows and selling them out completely before you book bigger venues. When you’re at the point of doubling the usual cover at a venue, that’s a good sign that you’re ready to move up.

Technorati Tags: music+business, booking, TicketMaster, StubHub, eBay

Ticketmaster and Venues Experiment with Auction Pricing originally appeared on spinme.com on September 12, 2006. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

I was helping to produce a seminar for musicians at the front end of the MySpace explosion — this was a few years ago — and a band pitched a booking agent at the event by saying, “we’ve already got 2,000 friends on MySpace!”

And the booking agent replied, “ugh, you’re not one of those MySpace bands, are you?”

While you can make the argument that MySpace has kicked and clawed its way into the mainstream since then, talent buyers still have that attitude.

Why?

Because internet buzz is not the same as street buzz, as this weekend’s disappointing results for Snakes on a Plane showed. All of that great hype and excitement worked to keep the disaster flick from becoming a total box office disaster. But, by Hollywood standards, it didn’t fly. Hopefully, it can live on, like Office Space, to become a monster hit on DVD.

Now, look at a gig through the eyes of a talent buyer. Let’s say she books a band that doesn’t sound so hot on tape, but has a convincing booker and 5,000 MySpace friends. For her to break even (and for the band to get paid), she’s got to see 50 fans in the door. On a modestly performing, targeted mailing list, you could make the right offer and get 1% of your fans to show up. However, this band’s MySpace list isn’t targeted, isn’t organized, and is full of folks who love to click around online — not necessarily go to shows. The band gets ten people in the door and finds it hard to get gigs in the same zone for six months because of it.

The critical thing to remember is that, when you’re in the business of getting folks out to a show (or even a movie), the Internet is your competition. Yes, there are lots of ways that you can use MySpace as part of your overall music marketing campaign. (And if you’re not using Bob’s guide, you’re probably just spinning your wheels.) Just make sure your entire bet isn’t riding on the MySpace crowd, or you’ll get some snide remarks from club bookers when you call to get yourself booked.

Technorati Tags: music+business, myspace

Internet Buzz Is Not the Same as Street Buzz originally appeared on spinme.com on August 22, 2006. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

[Thanks to a Stereogum commenter for a great headline.]

In my books, I’ve written about the ways that baby bands would push hard to get a date at a venue like CBGB, then complain when a talent buyer would insist on preselling dozens of tickets for a showcase slot. (Hint: the talent buyer knows you don’t know anybody in New York, and they’re not running a charity.)

The same scene’s playing out in every city in America — a legendary club can’t get enough people in the door, and they can’t keep up with skyrocketing rents in revitalized city centers. So, they make the painful business decision to shut down or move away.

In CBGB’s case, they’re moving to Vegas. Hilly Krystal has understood the power of his brand for a long time. And, just like vacationers and conventioneers try to relive their evenings at Studio 54, expect a relatively sanitized version of CBGB to attract many of the folks that crowded it back in its heyday.

In a nutshell, the idea of CBGB became more valuable than the actual building itself. The folks that went to CBGB back in the day wouldn’t care for the music that’s been playing there lately. And the audiences that bands wished would show up for their showcases often gravitated to trendier (and cleaner) venues, if they went out at all.

Apart from the historical significance, why should this matter to most working musicians? It underscores my point that it’s not a club’s job to guarantee foot traffic — it’s up to you, the entertainer — to get people in the door. And your competition is not the other bands that are playing that night. Your competition is everything else that your perfect audience might be doing instead of coming to your gig:

• XBox Live
• Netflix
• Video-On-Demand
• Scrabble Night
• …whatever

CBGB was pulling more visitors for behind-the-scenes tours in the afternoon than listeners to live gigs. And it wasn’t surprising to see acts at the mellow Gallery (including some of my own clients) pulling bigger audiences than the main hall. While a Vegas location may provide some guaranteed foot traffic, something that most clubs have not enjoyed for years, CB’s West will probably wind up as a brand-name stage pulling in known performers and not a place for baby bands to play.

In the meantime, Heidi’s looking for your anecdotes and stories about the original CBGB. No matter what it became, it still was a flashpoint at a time in this country when you could build an entire scene around one stage.

Technorati Tags: music+business, CBGB, booking, Las+Vegas, New+York

CBGB: Punk’s First Theme Park originally appeared on spinme.com on August 9, 2006. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Jay Flanzbaum from the indispensible OnlineGigs has a great article at Galaris this month about the distinction between being effectively persistent and just bugging the snot out of a talent buyer. Most of the bands that claim “nobody will book my band” probably had someone Jay’s describing screw up their potential relationship.

Technorati Tags: music+industry, booking+agent, talent+buyer

Getting through to Talent Buyers: Pest vs. Persistent originally appeared on spinme.com on August 1, 2006. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

This article has been around for awhile but the information is still valid: Working With An Agent.

The point is this: regardless of how wonderful a talent your are, the commissions you pay a booking agent must be able to not only cover the agent’s expenses related to their representing you, but must provide some degree of profit for them. If you as an artist cannot provide an agent a profit, then you are asking the agent to make a financial investment in you and your career. Think about that for a moment.

I think some artists believe that an agent can get them better gigs, and in doing so increase their audience. While the first part is probably true in most cases, the hard truth is if you’re not drawing a crowd now, you probably aren’t ready for those “better” gigs anyway.

In most cases it’s better to wait, and focus on building your local audience as much as you can. You really don’t want an agent coming to check out your band and finding an empty room.

Working With An Agent originally appeared on spinme.com on February 17, 2006. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Ahem. Check, one two…check… ::thump thump::

Hi. I’m Scott Andrew, singer-songwriter guy from Seattle, and as Joe already mentioned, I’ll be a guest blogger on spinme.com for the next few weeks. I’ve never been a “guest blogger” before, so this is a brand-new venture for me. Also, I hope I don’t break anything. So here we go.

Last week I caught Greg Behrendt’s new stand-up comedy special Greg Behrendt Is Uncool on Comedy Central. Sporting a black tee, wallet chain and spiky hair, the 42-year-old Behrendt bases much of his stand-up on the plight of the aging rocker dude. (My favorite bit is Behrendt’s lesson on how to play air guitar.)

But the part that caught my attention as a musician was Behrendt’s ideal “adult rock show.” He outlined the following criteria:

• Start the show at 7:00pm. None of this waiting ’til midnight stuff, we got jobs!
• Age-restricted. If we grownups are paying a premium for tickets, there will be NO MOSHING.
• No opening acts. (“I don’t wanna see you struggle through your career! I could be dead before you get good!”)
• Play only your hits. We’re glad you’re working on new material, but we want to sing, please.
• End the concert in ONE HOUR, tops, so we’re home by 9:00pm (hopefully in time for Lost).

Of course, the largely over-30 crowd roared back in approval, because even though it was a joke, you just know they’d totally dig a show like that. Heck, I’d pay extra.

It got me thinking about how often we expect people to rearrange their daily routines to accommodate our needs as performers. Shouldn’t that be the other way around?

Do any of these sound familiar?

“I really wanted come to your show, but I just can’t stay awake past eleven these days.”

“I was planning on coming, but there’s never any parking downtown, and it’s kind of dangerous at night.”

“That place is always crowded, smoky and there’s never any seating. I think I’ll pass.”

It’s easy to get stuck thinking there’s only one kind of gig. Are your designing your shows to appeal to your audience, or are you just booking where you can, when you can, and praying for a good turnout?

There’s More Than One Kind Of Gig originally appeared on spinme.com on January 23, 2006. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Finally getting back to speed after getting a bad, bad cold during my holiday expeditions (the cold all my Northeast U.S. clients warned me that I would get!) — I’m catching up on a few hundred e-mails. If I haven’t responded to yours yet, just hang tight! I’ll plow through them over the course of the day.

I did want to call attention to this article in Slate that describes the decline and fall of a New York cafe.

So many of my clients are trying to work with mom-and-pop establishments on their first bookings, that I often have to remind them that helping folks like these get people in the door is your job. Establishing a great relationship with an owner/operator, especially at a place that doesn’t often offer music, can get you to your first residency gig.

Look at how much every cup of coffee sold means to these folks. If you can get 25 people in the door and each one of them buys an Americano and a croissant, you just helped that cafe make $75 in profit during your 60 minute set. Do it every week, and you’re adding $300 to your bottom line.

This helps your bottom line in a few ways:

• You’re showing other talent buyers that you know your job is to help them make money.
• You’re creating regular opportunities for your audience to see you, and to bring their friends.
• You’re teaching your audience that buying something at the venue is part of the regular support you need to keep making music.

Some musicians I meet at music conferences and seminars complain that they shouldn’t be judged based on how many people they bring on the door. Unfortunately, that’s the only metric talent buyers can use to figure out if your act is worth the risk.

Booking agents and self-booking musicians that frame up bookings in terms of actual people that can get to a gig will always get more bookings than rookies that plead for an open slot “because they’re good.” As you can see from the cautionary tale of this cafe, “good” doesn’t always pay the bills.

Remember that even small venues don’t owe “the scene” anything — they’re simply trying to do what they can to break even. If you can help them do that in a way that’s fun and memorable, all the better.

[ Thanks to David Lorenzo for the tip! ]

Track these topics: music+business

The Coffeehouse Talent Buyer State of Mind originally appeared on spinme.com on January 3, 2006. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

All that posting about Rock Star: INXS has given some folks the impression that my company is the booking agency for INXS.

Uh, no. Just a fan. You can stop e-mailing me now.

But you can find their current itinerary at Pollstar and you can contact their business office by e-mail for information about booking corporate events.

This does bring up a curious point. The booking agency business is traditionally shrouded in mystery, so there are a bunch of folks on the web that claim they’re the official booking agent for INXS, or Dave Matthews, or anybody else. In reality, the ones that aren’t scam artists are actually middlemen that can, in some cases and if the money’s right, broker concert events.

You can avoid that markup by approaching a booking agency directly with a serious offer. A serious offer means you’ve got five digits or more to spend at a venue like a concert hall or a hotel ballroom, not your buddy’s house with the big back yard. See what Ani Difranco’s booking agency has written about making good offers.

Most professional booking agents are off the grid, usually out of fear of being inundated with unsolicited submissions. Without their presence, sharks can fill the water. Pollstar’s professional directories are the definitive places to look for names and coordinates — and if you can’t buy them, you’ll have to find a library that has them or make good friends with a record company intern that can borrow one for the night.

Track these topics: booking agency, INXS

INXS Booking Agency (and slick middlemen) originally appeared on spinme.com on October 6, 2005. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Troy at Nomad Artists, a super booking/management agency here in Athens, is expanding into concert promotion and needs some interns. (And for crying out loud, let’s not have a repeat of the Chicago incident — send your contact info to Nomad, not to the comments!)

Athens, GA Music Internship originally appeared on spinme.com on August 19, 2005. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.