Nathan Hubbard, former CEO of Ticketmaster, dropped a scorch-the-earth essay on the state of concert ticketing on The Ringer. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’s about to haul away a whole bucket of Tony Awards for Hamilton, penned an op-ed piece for the…
I caught a little bit of the dust-up on Twitter today about this article in the Atlantic that targets the—shall we say—sanitized nature of the National Association of Campus Activities conventions. Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke…
I’m usually the only voice in a room full of musicians and music managers telling folks to slow down touring until you’ve saturated all of the zones in your region. (Understand the Zone Booking Strategy I’m talking about by checking…
UPDATE 6/23/2016: Sad news. After a few changes of ownership and management, Steel City’s going to shut down for good. Sad club closing news to report: Steel City Coffeehouse in Phoenixville to close .https://t.co/AACSqQRGLM — wxpnfm (@wxpnfm) May 23, 2016…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
[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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Clear Channel (aka "The Evil Empire" in some circles) is making another really wild business move that may put you on a great footing with your talent buyer. Even for their A-list and B-list events, CC’s live business is abandoning…