Guerrilla Promotion and Artist Development
David Codr Founder of Musicpage.com
After promoting or producing around 1,000 concerts, managing bands, booking tours and scouting talent, you pick up a few tricks of the trade. That's how I started doing artist development work. The gang at Festival Network Online asked if I would share a few of my artist development techniques in this newsletter.
So if you are looking for some artist development techniques, read on.
How to Get 3,000 New Fans in the Next 12 Months, For FREE
Running a web community like Musicpage.com, I get a lot of artist development questions from our artist users. When I do, one of the first things I do is ask how many fans a band or performer has. If I get a non-specific answer like "a lot" I know the band isnt doing a very good job of collecting information or growing their fan base.
Most bands have figured out how to get people to become their friend on facebook or twitter, but that's not a real fan base. A fan base is more than a list of names. A real fan base is a growing entity with its own quirks and personality.
Maybe its best to consider WHY you are trying to build a fan base. Sadly, most artists think its simply to have the biggest list. But your fan base shouldn't be about quantity as much as it is about quality. In the most simple terms, building a fan base is all about cultivating a list of your customers.
Think about it, why do you advertise and promote your shows? You're trying to reach a group of people who will come to see you play. Well if you get the names and contact info for people at your current shows, you can go straight to the source when you start promoting your next show. This is much more effective than just running ads or handing out flyers to reach your fans the next time.
Reaching out to your existing fans is your "Sure thing" while your other forms of advertising are there to add to your total. When you combine tactics this way, you will see a dramatic increase in the number of people who attend your show.
Most bands that do try to collect their fan's information have a clipboard on the front of the stage or at their merch table - and that's about all the effort they put into collecting their fan's info. But collecting your fan's information is crucial. Aside from your performance, its literally one of the most important things you will do at your shows.
Thing is, people dont like writing down their contact info on a sheet of paper that anyone else in the bar can see. So you end up with a lot of fake names or illegible emails. The clipboard also usually only gets a few names a night. So you're getting low quality and low quantity, a bad combination.
I tell bands I work with to print up "Fan cards" an old one is pictured here (click to enlarge). Fan cards are 3x5 index cards with pre-printed fields for; name, address, city, state, zip, age, birthday, facebook and myspace addresses, phone and cell phone numbers.
You always want to get someone's zip code when getting their email address for your list. This is especially important for touring acts. Having a zip code allows you to only email people who are close enough to the venue to make it out to the show (if its a single show announcement rather than a list of all upcoming shows).
