Biz Booster Hot Tip!

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…

How to think like a college activities committee is completely different that any of the past Biz Booster's in this series. Playing colleges can put some jingle in your pocket, but it’s a true juggling act to complete a booking with college activities committees. Depending on which committee you are trying to work with, concert, coffee house or lectures, you need to prepare yourself for a different way of doing business. First thing you need to prepare for is that you may be dealing with a student or student committee rather than a staff person or staff committee. The Activities Director oversees the committee and will most likely be the…

How to think like a festival artistic director is a far cry from either a club booker or a Performing Arts Presenter. Why? Because a festival artistic director often only has to plan one event all year. That event may have multiple days, multiple stages, multiple workshop areas and cater to a multi-generational audience, but it is one event. During that one event, they may actually have to program and book more artists than an entire season at a performing arts center. That is why it takes them the better part of a year to create and book all the programming. So, would like to play festivals? It would probably…

How to think like a club booker is very different from the thought processes of Performing Arts Presenters. The folks that book clubs, work on a much shorter booking time-frame, and have different concerns that drive their bookings. Years ago I wrote a column for Gig Magazine that was a series of interviews with club bookers across the country. My goal was to get into their thought process around how they select their acts and what kind of marketing materials helped them make their choices. As a result of that research along with my own booking experience, I have some helpful insights I’d like to share with you. Clubs book…