promoter with 2nd pencil will then have 24 hours to confirm a night or give up the pencil. This is only if the first pencil can’t confirm however.
4
Time to start contacting other bands about playing on your night!
This can be a tricky business, or as easy as pie, it depends on who you are and who you are asking. You have to bear in mind not everyone will want to play your gig due to a number of factors such as:
1) Date
2) Location (they may only want to do certain venues)
3) Their band schedule (might be recording or going on tour soon)
4) Your band’s popularity (bigger bands definitely won’t support you, even if they’re bigger by just a fraction and they might not want you to support them either).
5) Ticket prices (they know what their bands pay, or what value they are setting themselves at to fans)
6) Payment
Negotiate a guaranteed fee payment
More established bands will work under this payment rule, especially if they have a booking agent working for them. This payment is paid no matter what, so long as the
artist fulfils their end of the performance contract. So if you make a loss, you still have to pay the band.
Rule of thumb when offering a payment for negotiation:
Always start at a fee more in your favour than you are willing to go. Professionals always negotiate and will push it more towards their favour. Allowing this room for negotiating will help out with keeping costs low.
5
, I won’t go too much in depth with this since it’s a huge topic in itself. One of the things I will say though is to make sure that all the bands involved are also promoting the event through their channels. Most tend to forget about it until the last few days.
Once when I was promoting a gig, I had a band turn round to me saying “It’s the promoter’s job to promote, and the band’s job to play”…
This couldn’t be any more untrue. The promoter has access to the channels which targets wider audiences, so posters, flyers, listings online, and such, HOWEVER!! The band have sole access to their own channels of which they use to engage with their following (facebook, mailing lists, twitter, etc). Even big mega giants like Foo Fighters promote their own shows.
6
Ok, so hopefully you have managed to get through to this part.
A week or two before the day of the gig, make sure you get in contact with all parties involved to ensure they know the schedule, when they need to be at the venue (usually you will get one band with a member still at work for sound check despite having months to book the time off…). This is important because for all you know, they could have completely forgotten about it. It’s recommended you keep a constant contact going through the entire process but particularly closer to the date.
On the night of the gig, you need to be the one running the show, for if things go wrong, you will be the one that takes the brunt of it and most likely the blame. That means pressuring people to be in the right place at the right time, making sure they’re not taking too long sound checking, make sure they’re ready to get on stage at the right times, coming off at the right times, etc etc. This can be a stressful job which is why sometimes a venue will provide a stage manager to oversee this.
It is the night of a gig where things most often go wrong in some way or another and it is down to you to make ad hoc decisions to find solutions. Keeping calm and focused is a must since if you start panicking, you won’t be able to think what to do and then everyone else will start getting stressed and panicking also.
Also, make sure you introduce yourself to the bands, sound engineer, venue management, and all personnel involved with the running of the gig. Good impressions creates good contacts, which in turn creates much better opportunitie