Tag Archives | touring

24 July 2012

Black Flag’s Henry Rollins on how he found success as a musician.

We’ve mentioned Black Flag on this blog before. This video is about how Henry Rollins (Black Flag’s best known singer) joined the band. Through hard work, focus, discipline and a lucky break he achieved success as a musician. He’s also acted in hollywood movies, started his own publishing company and become a successful spoken word artist. [...]

10 March 2012

How do musicians really earn a living?

It used to be relatively simple to work out how successful musicians got paid, you signed to a record label, put out an album and toured in support of it. If you made a profit after paying back your advance and all associated costs you got paid. This is called recouping (most bands failed to [...]

13 February 2012

Can your band achieve mainstream success via social media?

Recently we highlighted the story of Jon Gomm’s viral video hit Passionflower and the how it received over a million views thanks to Reddit and social media. Many people see viral hits as useful but can’t see that they cross over into the mainstream press and TV. It depends who is talking about your music [...]

02 December 2011

How do you get support slots with touring bands?

One of the things unsigned bands often want to do is do support slots with well known acts. Support slots allow you the opportunity to connect to both a new audience and people within the industry. Bands have supports for a few reasons but mostly to get a few extra people through the door. Sometimes [...]

15 November 2011

How do you connect to an audience of 10000 fans?

Most bands dream of walking out onstage to a packed audience, full of excited fans, screaming and clapping. That is the dream. But what is the path to get to that point? How do you go from playing in a pub to gaining the attention of the fans and the music industry? It happens all [...]

11 October 2011

Using Ticket Tailor to sell tickets for your gigs

Often on the blog we talk about putting on your own gigs and how to make things happen for yourself. One of the things you will want to do when organising your own events is to sell tickets via the web. Ticket Tailor is a company that allows you to sell tickets for your events [...]

08 September 2011

20 ways to get more gigs for your band (part 2)

In part 2 of this post we’ll look at building your local community, borrowing ideas from others and how to stand out amongst all the other bands. Stand out – Look at a band like Cardiacs. They are an amazing live act, very theatrical with make up, costumes and confetti bombs. Initially people hated them [...]

25 August 2011

12 low cost promotional ideas for musicians

Times are hard for everyone at the moment, especially musicians. Unfortunately you can spend a lot of time signing up for free promotional sites online that will do nothing to raise their profile. Your time is limited, as are your funds so you need to focus on the free and low cost promotional opportunities that [...]

19 August 2011

How to get the most out of your band practice

Rehearsing can be frustrating when all you want to do is be up in front of an audience and getting out there and doing it for real. What happens on stage is directly related to what happens in the rehearsal room. Get it right here and you will have more chance of building a fan [...]

09 August 2011

A standard letter for bands to send to promoters

Getting gigs can often be a very competitive business, everyone wants the best slots. Often bands struggle to know what to say when approaching promoters via email to get the first few gigs. This is our guide to putting together a very basic, to the point, generic email to send to promoters to get you playing [...]