Touring and Booking Agents

Every band or artist should be performing, especially if you’ve got product in stores. Not doing so is equivalent to not supporting your own release. It can be difficult for indies with unknown artists to obtain bookings. A good manager can help in this regard, but you will inevitably want to find a booking agent. There are booking agents who specialize in arranging tours for new bands, but unless these people are approaching you, it’s usually very hard to get them interested in a band no one’s heard of. Your booking agent gets paid only when they successfully book you. Their ability to do so is hindered if you are virtually unheard of. Since this is how the agents get paid, they will only take you on if they feel there’s reason to believe they can book you.

The way to obtain a booking agent is to play the numbers game. Send a press kit to as many booking agencies as you can locate. Once again, you are trying to sell yourself; do your homework and make sure your press kit is well put together and professional. The key now is to use EPKs (electronic press kits) in promoting your music to touring and booking agents. I recommend using Sonic Bids or building a Reverbnation site profile.

If you are going to attempt to book your own independent tour, it’s important that you have built up or generated a “story”/buzz around your release—some degree of college radio airplay, press, local chart activity or other notoriety so that you can interest venue owners in your act.

You should begin generating this interest at least two or three months prior to launching any tour. After you’ve done a radio mail-out, concentrate on the stations that played your record or markets where you seem to be hot. Make sure your distributor is aware of these developments as well as your plans to tour. It’s a good bet you are already building a fan base in these areas. Whenever possible, work with the local stations in trying to secure bookings. They know everything about the music scene in their town; most of them sponsor or present shows on campus or in town, and they have the clout to get the shows booked.

Figure 10.1 Crowded Night Club

Getting the support of individual college and public stations is the best way to plan a tour. At the least, they can tell you what clubs in their city cater to your style of music. Ask if they would like to sponsor or in some way support the shows. Such a commitment from radio will no doubt include announcing the show on the air, giving away tickets to the show and doing an on-air interview with your band, not to mention increased airplay. If they’re interested, call the area venues and tell them that your band is in the Top 10 at the local station, and that the station will be involved in the show.

Most venue owners won’t agree to pay an out-of-town, independent band more than $750 to $1,000 for a full set, and you must demonstrate sufficiently that your performance will draw a substantial number of patrons. Quite often venue owners will not grant you a flat stated rate guarantee. They may prefer to pay you a percentage of the money collected at the door on the night of your performance. You should always try to get a flat guarantee or a combination of guarantee and percentage of the door. Always verify that the venue will be assisting in promoting the show, either in print media, local TV, radio or at least at the venue itself in the weeks leading up to the show.

The question of the day is where do you find touring and booking agents? I have two recommendations: Pollstar Booking Agency Directory, which you can purchase directly on their website at www.pollstar.com and which lists over 640 booking agencies and represents more than 10,000 artists worldwide. The cost of the book is $99 and is updated biannually. The other resource is Musician’s Atlas (online tool), which has a booking agents section listed on the site. They have a monthly fee starting at $19.99. View www.musiciansatlas.com.

Show Sales

As an independent label or artist you will not want to squander any opportunity to sell units and clearly there are few opportunities as prevalent as during a show. However, be careful—if you have product at retail through distribution you may be working against yourself. Attendees at your show may be hot to buy your product after hearing the live performance, but each unit you sell at the show is one less you will sell at retail POS. The reason this can be critical is that CDs sold at the venue are not receiving SoundScan credit; they’re not counting at all. This will hurt your attempts to secure a major label or distribution deal. Keep in mind SoundScan will count gig sales if the proper procedures are in place. Always check with your distributor to make sure that product will be in the market by show time. If not, then go ahead and do what you have to do. When distribution is involved and in place, the best way to ensure that your live performances generate sales is to work the crowd. You should always pass out POP at the venue; the phrase “Available in select stores NOW” should be stated on all your materials. You can even go a step further and indicate which retailers are carrying your release.

Fan Clubs

If you have a mailing list of fans and friends, you can mail those catalogs or postcards that announce your new record and tell them where to pick it up. Live performances are a great time to add folks to your mailing list or fan club. If you don’t have a mailing list, you should probably start one. At venues you can have attendees sign a guest book, perhaps leaving their email addresses. If you have a music website, it is a must in building your fan base. Plan on having a fan base platform integrated into your website. Obtain mailing lists from others; get subscriber lists from magazines. Word of mouth is still the number one method of promotion. Fan clubs are also wonderful tools in that regard. As time goes on, you will notice more and more attendees at your performances; it is ultimately the key in building your customer fan base and selling your music.

Figure 10.2 Artist on Tour

Mailing Campaign Follow-Ups

Promoters mail free promotional copies of new releases to a large number and variety of destinations. Mailing out this many free recordings is costly. Experienced promoters use a very select mailing list, one that includes mostly influential stations or stations where the promoter has personal contacts, and trades where they are fairly confident of receiving a review—basically, destinations where the material is likely to be well received and where it is beneficial to send.

All mail campaigns must be followed up by telephone calls. The success of this kind of telephone follow-up depends not only on the suitability of the recordings mailed with respect to the destination, but the rapport between the caller and the recipient. If you are planning to hire an independent promotions firm to do either your mailing or the follow-up campaign, or both, you want to find a firm that has experience and very strong contacts and resources in the industry. Don’t be shy about asking them to facilitate some sort of confirmation or verification of the stated resources. Do your homework.

Club Promotion

Dance clubs have historically and consistently been effective places to measure the pulse of the 18-to-26 music-buying demographic. They are for that reason great forums to test new music product. Prior to commercial release for retail consumption, record labels should look to test-market their new product by launching a club promotion campaign. Send promotional copies of your pending release to appropriately formatted clubs. Whenever possible, this campaign should also include live performance bookings at clubs. Don’t be shy about enlisting the aid of the DJs or club managers to help gauge response to your music. If the clubs report strong response, this could be a precursor to having a truly marketable release on your hands. Always be sure to share this information with your distributor; include it in your press kit for reviewers and radio. This particular type of campaign will not be cheap; most club DJs demand vinyl, sometimes two pieces each.

Most record labels supply clubs through record/DJ “pools.” Servicing record pools is a good move, even critical for certain genres. If strong word of mouth develops through the network, and the track gains good airplay in that region, the single may be headed for the charts. Another way dance clubs contribute to record promotion is by showing music videos of new releases on high-resolution monitors or TVs in the club. Clubs obtain most of their tapes through video distribution companies that act as liaisons between record companies and the clubs. Dancers are literally surrounded by imagery and sensory intake with clubs’ multiple screens and overpowering sound systems. These same club-goers may be stimulated enough to later walk into a store and pick up a copy of your release to continue enjoying the vibe at home.

Campaign Management

In order to ensure efficiency and results, any promotional campaign must be tightly managed. With so many elements involved and so much follow-up required, diligent management and oversight is a requisite. Whether you take this task on yourself or contract it out, it must be done. Many labels opting to self-manage their promotional campaigns will assign one particular individual to manage it. This is a good idea. That person will likely require assistance, however there should only be one person charged with oversight. The campaign manager should be aware of the budget they have to work with and should conduct the campaign in conjunction with the distributor. A good campaign manager will have a considerable awareness of market, regional and national data pertinent to your release and be able to conduct analysis of that data to derive sound strategy for the campaign. It cannot be stated enough how critical it is for the campaign manager to be in constant contact with your distributor regarding all aspects and developments of the campaign. The manager will have the responsibility of assigning particular promotions personnel to certain geographic areas and to coordinate the efforts of staff promoters working in many different directions. If the distributor is unaware of such activity geographically, you run the risk of generating substantial consumer demand in a market or region and not having any units in stores there. This is actually a worse scenario than not promoting at all. Consumers eager to purchase your release may become disinterested if the title is not available to them at retail. Additionally, radio stations playing your track may cease doing so if the release is not available for their listeners to purchase. Proper, sound management will ensure that this and other promotion blunders never occur.

With radio promotion campaigns in particular the campaign manager is sometimes called a “tracker” because the job’s primary responsibilities center on keeping track of which stations are adding or dropping the new release as well as spin rate or level of rotation. If the tracker observes good airplay developing in a particular geographic area, they may double efforts there in an attempt to develop a regional hit. If a regional breakout occurs, it can, if properly managed, be parlayed into a national hit.

The tracking person or manager also has the task of following the progress of a new release on the trade charts. The early rise and fall of a recording on the charts provides guidance on how to spend (or withdraw) the money available for a particular campaign.

Advertising

Advertising is obviously an important component of music promotion campaigns. A wide variety of media have proven effective, such as print, broadcast, point-of-sale and direct mail. All advertising seems to help sales in a general sense, but the difficulty is measuring whether the resulting sales justify the expense. Do not allow sentiment (or for example, your desire to see your release on television) to play a part; base it solely on the numbers. Different advertising media will show results differently and along different timelines. For example: if you are monitoring your sales as a measure, a print media ad schedule will take more time to manifest sales than a weekend blitz radio schedule. Be patient when required, but be decisive and proactive when necessary.

Advertising can be cooperative, with the label and the store sharing costs, or institutional—for example, a print page or media buy that mentions a store or particular retailer. Co-op advertising may be paid up-front, all or in part by the retailer or the distributor, then reimbursed by the label from a co-op budget determined by the retailer’s volume of purchases from the distributor. To justify the high expense, several titles are pushed in one ad, thus pulling down the cost-per-thousand expense per title. Local record store chains will frequently place print ads in newspapers. However, the record label may in fact pay for all or part of the costs for such ads. Sometimes record stores request that record labels finance a print media campaign in their area through the distributor. Or the label itself initiates print ads, particularly when it is trying to coordinate advertising with the promotion of local concerts.