Jeri Goldstein

Don't confuse an inquiry with an offer. I see it done all the time. Have you ever had this happen to you? You get a call from a venue who is all excited about the possibility of booking you for an event. You discuss the date, the price and a bunch of other details. It’s looking great and you think, “What a wonderful way to start the day?” A few days pass, then a week, then a few weeks, and you don’t hear anything more from the person, so you give them a call. And now you begin to get the run-around, the delay tactics and the uncertainty that now…

The benefits of training your own agent is to help make a difference in your bookings prior to ever working with an official booking agency. Nearly every artist I speak with would love to hand over that task of booking their gigs to an agent. Most truly believe that once they are on an agency roster, they are set and the gigs will just start rolling in. I really do hate to be the one to burst that bubble, but burst I must. Depending on your market demand and where you are in your career, being aligned with an agent may be perfect for you and the gigs may certainly…

Defining success for your career and life must be based on your success parameters only. Let's get one thing straight from the start, everyone's definition of success is going to be different. And that really goes for musicians and performing artists. When it comes to touring, your definition of what makes a successful gig or tour could also be unlimited. Perhaps it was a success because you lost less money than you thought you would, or broke even. Perhaps you sold more CDs than you anticipated or even got more PR coverage than ever before. To define success you enter into an evolving process and each project requires you to…

Let's talk about how to use recurring events as anchor dates for booking your tours. I’ve talked about how to use anchor dates to move your bookings forward in previous Biz Boosters. Since we are moving into the summer and festival season, I thought I would use this week’s recurring event as a good example of how to plan far into the future. Today is Memorial Day, a yearly holiday that kicks off festival season and outdoor summer fairs and concert series. It is an occasion that sparks parties and picnics throughout the weekend. It is a recurring event that you can plan on every year. Someone, some organization, some…

How can you Uniquify Yourself? Are you following the crowd? Trying be like other artists you know so the fans will like you too? These days it is so important to call attention to yourself and your art by standing out from the crowd and to uniquify yourself! That is why you must find your unique qualities and promote them. In the search for acceptance, so many artists try to be like the artists who everyone already knows and likes. But that artist became known and liked because they stood out from the rest. They were unique. What makes you stand above the fray? What quirks, physical attributes, vocal qualities,…

Knowing how to write audience specific press releases can make a huge difference in how much press coverage you receive. Writing press releases for an intended audience is not a one size fits all, scenario. If you want to broaden your outreach, you may need to narrow your focus and vary your writing to speak more directly to your various audiences. Start with a basic press release that covers the main information you want to get across. This may be as short as a three or four sentence second paragraph. The first and last paragraph will normally include the informational who, what, where, when, why and how of the press…

Have you set your touring preferences? Do you simply follow the crowd? So, everyone of the acts you know is playing at the club down the street. But you don’t like starting your gigs at 11pm. And, if you play that club, you have to start at 11pm. If you don’t play that club, then where are you going to play? That’s the place you know about so that must be the place you have to play? Right? Wrong! You don’t have to follow the crowd. In fact, you will do yourself and your art a great disservice if you do follow the crowd. So what’s the first thing I…

I want to talk about how to set realistic pricing for your gigs. It all starts by establishing your value in the markets you play. Whether you are an agent booking solos, duos, trios or any configuration of a group, or whether you are booking your own act, establishing the value of the act in the desired markets is the one true way in which you can begin to create realistic pricing. It is not the number of people in the group or even necessarily the night of the week that matters. How to set realistic pricing is about the value of the act that drives the negotiation. Let’s test…

How to Think Like Elementary School Cultural Arts Programmers takes on a completely different set of concerns than any of the other types of programmers already discussed in this series. Many artists have found a welcome home in elementary schools. Perhaps you are one of those artists. Booking school gigs has its own set of challenges and rewards. Finding the right person to work with within the school system will be different from district to district, city to city and even country to country. This is one of those situations where you need to do some research and the more locally you focus your attention at first, the more productive…