[Maximizing Each Tour Stop]

If I’m an independent artist and I’m a new artist, I’m try to get out, what I have to do is I have to look at every fan that walks through the door as being somebody that I can use for the rest of my career to earn income off of. Now that’s a pretty harsh way of saying it, but it is just simply how it is. I want them to appreciate the music more than anything but I also have to look at them as a potential source of income. And so if you do the math on it, if they buy a T-Shirt once a year, if they buy an album once a year, if they come to two of my shows a year, you know, start doing the math, add up the money. It doesn’t take that many fans for you to earn enough income to survive and prosper. So the challenge becomes how can I get the maximum number of people to come through the door. Then once I get them in the door, win them over. It’s a two-part process.

So if I’m on tour lets say and I’m going out for my initial tour. One of the things that I don’t want to do is, I don’t want to stay up all night partying and get tired. What I want to do is, I want to have interviews lined up on radio shows. I want to go to the record stores. I want to shake the hands with the people, the 18-year-old kid behind the counter that recommends music to people that walk through the door. I want to give them a T-Shirt; I want to give them signed posters. I want to give them anything I can give them that will reinforce my name to them, give them free tickets to the gig that night. Give them some extra tickets so they can bring some their friends. And you basically have to work all day to try to muster up any interest that you can in getting people in the door, so you can win them over once you get them in the door. Now once you get them in the door there is no substitute for a good manager, who can make sure that event that happens is memorable and notable, unique in some way, so it that will win them over once they get in the door; it’s a two step process.

So most of the artists that make it; have an advance team, which sometimes is the spouse of somebody in the band. So you have an advance team, that gets to the next venue two days before you do, and they leave before you get there...who line up all this stuff, they line up the meet and greets, they line up the interviews with the DJs at the radio station, they line up an interview with the writer at the newspaper that does the reviews for music. They line up all this in advance before you even get to town, and then when you get to town it’s all laid out for you, so you don’t have to do it when you get there. Then the next day, you go to the next gig and they are at the gig three days down the road lining up all the things for you when you get there. Now all that does is increase the probability that you will get more people in the door.

First of all, you always want to collect as much data as you can on your customers, the people that come in the door. I want their Internet address more than anything else. If I have a list serve or I have a list of people who have come my gigs, I can swap those, I can trade those with another artists that’s similar to me. That plays similar music to me. We can swap lists. I will give them mine; they give me theirs. Then if I can isolate those people somehow to the town that I’m playing in, I can more or less send a personal invitation to that person saying, “I play music, I’m new in town, we’re passing through, we play music very similar to these guys and these guys recommended that we invite you to come to the gig tonight. There is a coupon here and just bring the coupon to the door and we will let you in for free or we will let you in for 50% off or whatever.” Just to get them in the door.

The acid test of whether a band is good, one of the acid tests, is how many people are there for the last note of the last song. So, if the place is still full of people, the last note of the last song, and you do an encore or whatever…the first thing…I don’t care how tired you are…the first thing you ought to do is get off the stage and go out and start shaking people’s hands, thanking them for coming by, handing out T-Shirts, doing anything you can to win those people over. What you don’t do is walk off the stage and go back into the dressing room like you are some kind of a super star. There are legendary people in the industry, who even when they peaked at the top of their career and were selling millions of albums, always stayed for the meet and greet, even if they had to stand by the their bus until four o’clock in the morning to shake everybody’s hand who was waiting to talk to them. They did it. If you take care of your fans, you nurture you fans that way, you’ll have an entourage of them following you around and they’ll bring enough money with them to keep you viable for the rest of your career.