Fraud Blocker

5 Hacks To Get Booked For More Live Music Shows

Live Music Shows

*This article may contain links to affiliate products & services. We have reviewed these services to try and ensure the highest quality recommendations*

Written by Omari

As Dylan Welsh describes in his article on Sonicbids, getting booked for gigs a musician or band is getting increasingly harder.

It's not just about being good, if you don't know how to market yourself and drive in revenue for the venue owner, then the next musician who DOES know that is going to get all the gigs instead of you.

1. DON'T JUST PLAY IN YOUR CITY

If you don't live in a bigger market, it's likely there's only a couple places to play in your city. Even if you have a ton of spaces to play at, you don't want to keep paying the same ones every single weekend either.

If you want to book more quality venues, you're going to have to branch out to surrounding areas. If you're gigging regionally, it's completely realistic to play out every weekend and not worry about saturating your crowd.

2. APPRECIATE THE CROWD MORE SO THAN THE VENUE

Booking agents (especially good ones) get bombarded with emails allllllllll the time. If you don't know how to fill a room, why would they give your email any attention?

However, if you know how to connect with the venue owners, you may be able to open up for a band that does know to fill a room.

Instead of focusing on he booking agents, focus on building a relationship with other acts in your city that have a good size following. Not so large that they'd ignore you, but enough that they're still humble.

It's much easier to get gigs through other bands than through a venue. Just be sure to return the favor by hooking them up when you get a gig too. NOBODY likes a musician who just has their hand out all the time without anything to offer in return.

If you can't bring monetary value to the table, learn how.

SIDE NOTE:

Never... and I repeat, NEVER have music with producer tags still in it when you're performing a live show.

This applies more so to singers and rappers, but I've definitely been to live shows where I've heard some producer tags in the background while someone was on stage.

It's looks horrible for you. The tagged versions are always lower quality than purchasing a beat so that the tags are removed.

If it has one tag in the beginning that's fine, but more than that is excessive.

Invest in yourself and purchase high quality, untagged instrumentals for single releases and live shows a.k.a. anything you're going to spend a lot of time promoting.

3. THE SHOW'S NOT OVER TILL THE FAT LADY SINGS

If you're not sending follow-up emails to venues or acts you play with, you're screwing up big time!

The day after gigging, spend some time sending emails. Thank the venue owner for their time, and be creative about it! Name something specific about playing there that you loved. Also, let them know you'd love to come back and play more.

Make the email about THEM! Focus on how you can help their venue and bring them more customers. Scratch their back, and they'll scratch yours.

Also, send compliments to any of the other acts on the bill that night. Wayyyy too many artists are just focused on their performance and never hit anybody else up after their shows.

Your network is your net worth.

4. BECOME A REGULAR

You'd be surprised how may opportunities you could get from small business owners simply by being a loyal customer.

Sometimes, you'll be able to book gigs at venues that don't normally allow live music too. Obviously, be smart about this though.

If you're a rapper, maybe some cafes don't play that sort of music; however, if you're an acoustic act you can get away with it. Once they become familiar with you as a customer, then drop a couple lines about your music too.

You get gigs from people, not places. Be more of a people person without pushing your music on them all the time, but know the right chance to slip it into the conversation.

5. BOOK EARLY AND OFTEN

Venues like to have full schedules. It means they'll be more likely to pay their bills and staff on time. Think ahead when you want to book a venue.

If you want to be performing every week, then stop trying to book gigs the week before. The 3 to 6 month range is great for local and regional gigging. This requires diligence on your part to book in advance, but it'll feel good to play every weekend when your schedule is full months prior.

Arranging things in advance with give all members of your crew a chance to check scheduling conflicts, get work off, and basically many any arrangements necessary for you to play an awesome show!


When your song is ready to go, it's time to start promoting it to potential fans! Omari has the best organic promotion services money can buy. With packages for Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, we will get your music the traffic and attention it deserves! Click below for more information.  


SPEAK YOUR MIND

    1 Response to "5 Hacks To Get Booked For More Live Music Shows"

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

How This INDIE Artist Got Over 67,598,275 Streams On ONE Song

Join the No-Nonsense Music Marketing Newsletter to get the most valuable weekly case studies and strategies to grow your music business!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

TOPICS

RECENT ARTICLES

SPOTIFY CAMPAIGN EXAMPLES

*Here are some small samples of the playlists in our network. Obviously, we aren't able to share every single list for confidentiality reasons, but these are a handful of examples out of the hundreds of playlists we have in our network.*


Playlists This Song Was Featured In

Contemporary Christian Music (33K Followers)

Louvores - Gospel (62K Followers)


Playlists This Song Was Featured In

Clean Rap & RNB (25K Followers)

Top Hits From New Artists (20K Followers)

Chill Music (38K Followers)


Playlists This Song Was Featured In

Today's Pop Hits (38K Followers)

Gaming Playlist & Workout Radio (23K Followers)


Playlists This Song Was Featured In

Forest Gump Soundtrack (50K Followers)

Stagecoach (15K Followers)

Best of Country Hits (2K Followers)


Playlists This Song Was Featured In

Acoustics For Relaxing (48K Followers)

Chill Music (9K Followers)


Playlists This Song Was Featured In

Hard Rock Workout (70K Followers)

Rock Hits (5K Followers)


Playlists This Song Was Featured In

Funky Songs Playlist (190K Followers)

Clean Rap & RNB (10K Followers)


[EDM/Future Bass] Melvin - Luv Again

Playlists This Song Was Featured In

Top Hits From New Artists (20K Followers)

Electro-mania (6K Followers)

Best Workout Playlist (14K Followers)


Close

SMALL CAMPAIGN EXAMPLES

MEDIUM CAMPAIGN EXAMPLES

[Hip Hop] K-Rich - We Workin  

LARGE CAMPAIGN EXAMPLES

[Hip Hop] Surve - Found My Way  


*Note: Songs may have ordered promotion from other sources as well. Small, medium, and large only denote the amount of promotion that was ordered from our service.  

Close

KID TRAVIS (R&B, POP)

With an already buzzing YouTube audience of over 400K+ subscribers, Kid Travis wanted his Instagram profile to start gaining some of that same traction.

While you can get some spill over audience from YouTube, Kid Travis knew that Instagram ad campaigns could boost his presence on IG even further!

He discovered that trying to run Instagram ads yourself vs. having us add our years of experience and expertise to them made a huge difference!

His main goal was to achieve new followers who are seriously interested in his journey as an artist.

Kid Travis already had amazing talent but needed to combine his music genius with some marketing expertise to get the best of both worlds.

We were able to bring out the heart of his music through paid ads by editing & optimizing his existing videos and properly researching and structuring his ad campaigns.

The end results: We were able to consistently and predictably gain followers averaging between $0.25-$0.35 per follower (including a bulk of the promotion being done in high cost English speaking countries such as United States, United Kingdom, Australia, & Canada) resulting in around 4,000 new, engaged followers/month on Instagram.

Kid Travis Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kidtravis/

Kid Travis YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/kidtravisofficial


*Note: Previous campaigns are not a guarantee for results in future campaigns. However, we do our best to ensure each client gets the best results possible.  

Close