Lunch Report: 12/14/2012 (Blast from the Past 2011 LR)

Today's lunch is Solara Tapas Bar! I love the tapas and a nice glass of wine...

Next weeks reporter is: Dave_P !

Now for the week-ending topic: Touring

Though the music industry remains in flux with drastic shifts in distribution and an overflowing market thanks to increased access to tools of production, one thing has become clear: live performance is a primary profit engine for professional musicians. But you can only play so much in your local market and when you are thinking of touring you are faced with the chicken-and-egg dilemma (which comes first?): you can't tour without fans and you can't make fans without touring.

Here is an idea for gradually increasing your touring base. Create a local fan base by playing somewhere regularly. It could be weekly or every other month. That probably depends on the size of your city (the population not the height of the buildings), how much other activity is competing with you, the demand for your particular music, etc. Create a community and following with your local regular gig; reasons for people to come back every time and to tell other people about your regular gig. Once you get momentum there, look at a map and draw a circle that includes all the other towns and cities that are drivable within a few hours of your town. Identify a town that would be ripe for another regular gig; maybe every other month. Find the right venue; one that already has a following similar to your band's following, or possibly one that is totally different but for which you could create a new local scene. Tell the two scenes about each other. Fans may have friends in your new sister city.

Once that bi-monthly gig is going get another on going in another town in a different direction from your home base. Once that's going, draw another wider circle on your map, encompassing towns that are a little further away from home. In the further cities, maybe you only play there a few times a year. Keep those email lists growing and make sure to categorize fans by their location, so you can target local fans every time you come back to the city. In some cases, as you continue to widen your concentric circles it might be a year between concerts in a given city. Eventually, if you can widen these touring circles further you will be able to align enough cities to have a full-fledged tour reaching to cities that were too far before, but are now within reach of the concert last night. You'll also be building a fan base all along and a touring record that a future booking agent can look at as evidence of your potential on their roster and your potential in other regions/cities.

This isn't a new idea, but I thought it would be a good topic to bring up...

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And now "Pictures o' the Day":



The Police, Live in Minneapolis 07/03/2007. Are there four members?



These pictures were taken by Stewart Copeland's son Jordan. Sting's son's band was the opening act. It's great how they keep their families close. He and KSM pulled together a whole package for me. I spent the rest of the night talking Leica cameras with Andy. They're all he uses and I have a few too...

I hope people enjoyed my reporting this week. It was an honor and I hope to do it again one day.



Cheers,

Will

* This is a Blast from the Past, LR from 2011 due to no report today...

Sounds like a good bit of tour advice there Will. We travel quite frequently with the band, and the shows are finally getting better attendance. There's nothing like playing to an empty room after driving for 9 hours (stupid sparsely populated country ) to deflate your ego completely.

So cool that you played with the Police!

Playing to an empty room. Sounds like a song lyric... I hear ya. The Police were great. Good people.


Cheers,

Will

Another very interesting blast from the past Will.

I agree with your ideas on building the following base. We are not planning on touring but we have this type of plan working for us. We are gigging in Grand Rapids and Brainerd with these very thoughts in mind. We do not want to gig every weekend but a couple of weekends a month. It appears that you have had a very enjoyable music gig and I really admire you for that. The production technology allows many to do their own production today. I also believe that this has a big impact on the professional production studios. Business technology changes constantly and what may be very profitable today could change dramatically in 5 years. Thanks for the blast from the past material this week Will, It was very enjoyable.-- Darwin.

Thanks for the interesting (old) stuff this week Will. I saw that particular Police tour twice: in '07 in the Key Arena with Fiction Plane as the opener, and in '08 in the Gorge with Elvis Costello and the Imposters as the opener. At the time of the tour I heard the story that the name Fiction Plane was Joe Sumner's nod to his more famous dad, it being an anagram of Police Infant (or Infant Police). Don't know whether that story is actually true but it is amusing.

- Jos

darwinohm: best of luck on the touring. It's an adventure!

Jos: you should get the DVD Box Set, Certifiable too. It was a blast and the backstage party with Moroccan-theme, first rate.


Cheers,

Will