The Manager’s Corner For May 2013
by Chris Daniels
I’ve managed my own band since the 1980s and despite the amazing change in technology, success in the music business is built around four tried and true elements: great music, really hard work, and timing (often mistaken for luck). The other key element is getting the help you need to make that luck happen. These days, that help is everywhere. The book I wrote for my UCD class on artist management is called “DIY: You’re Not in it Alone” and that is exactly what you need to understand.
Booking yourself: a band, a DJ, or a solo artist; any kind of music gig that requires “you” gaining the interest of a ‘buyer’ is both a blessing and a curse. The curse is the easy part to understand “believing your own hype” and not understanding the buyer’s world. Unless you are Madonna or Prince or Justin Bieber or any number of music stars who appear to have mastered the art of “I’m so fabulous,” there is an amount of natural discomfort about ‘tooting your own horn’ all the time that most of us possess. Those of us who are successful at booking, gain a pretty healthy sense of humor about the process. “I’m so fabulous” is often a necessary posturing, but the buyer has a worldview that is completely different. Like inflating your resume from cashier to “customer relation specialist,” it does come with the territory of getting the gig. But you have to UNDERSTAND that your buyer may not share that reality. And if you KNOW you are doing hyping, your chances of believing your own ‘hair-flip’ are greatly reduced, which is a good thing. If I talked to my friends and families the way that it is necessary to talk to potential festivals, venues, and concert series promoters, my friends would, I hope, laugh me out of the room. But it IS a necessary part of the business. You DO have to believe in your talent, and you DO have to be fearless in letting others know that it has ‘drawing power;’ that you have the ability to “put butts in the seats,” BECAUSE you do such a fabulous job when you perform.
But here is the trick for getting good at booking yourself: don’t take it personally! Every buyer, whether club owner, concert promoter, casino, college buyer, or festival talent coordinator, has a vision, a budget and an agenda that may seem like a ‘snub’ to you and your efforts to get booked. But, in point of fact, it usually has nothing to do with your talent. They almost always have a ‘reason’ they are looking for something that is NOT you. It could be budget restrictions, it could be the theme of the venue’s shows, it could be the venue’s need to CHANGE the way that the audience perceives the music being presented. One quick example: like bands from Mumford & Sons to the Eagles, I play at casinos. And here is the important part, music or comedy acts at a casino are about drawing people in to gamble, play the slots or the tables, and if the management changes or the casino changes hands, I might be out of a gig. Did the quality of my band decrease? NO! It had nothing to do with me. A whole lot of artists do not get that basic fact. A “buyer” has an agenda, and you might fit it perfectly TODAY, but next week, month or year, you may not fit their agenda. It’s a hard lesson for self-booking artists to get because they spend so much time learning to ‘believe’ in the product they are presenting, they sometimes lose sight of the fact that not getting the gig is almost always not about the quality of your work, but about the buyer’s needs.
So that is the curse part. What’s the up side? YOU! You have one concern: booking your talent in whatever venue that makes sense. It should excite you to be there, not exhaust your physical and mental resources, and pay you some damn money! Because that is your paramount concern – your lasar-like focus on the task of getting “work” is a much more powerful force than the booking agent with seven or ten acts that they are responsible for keeping on the road. YOU take the gigs that advance your career. You search for the ways to expand your fan-base AND keep yourself working to perfect your craft. YOU have uppermost in your mind, the constant cycle that is booking, (in case you don’t know, this is May, and smart booking people are now booking September through January). This is the reality YOU live with and YOU ARE #1 on your list of tasks to do today, not one of 12 or 14 acts on an agency roster. This is really powerful stuff. I can’t tell you how many times I hear, “Well we signed with agent XYZ and after about three months we were just not a priority for him/her and so things started to go wrong.” (At this point you should be channeling Spinal Tap’s great line “It should be Spinal Tap top billing and then Puppet Show.”) That usually doesn’t happen when you get good at booking yourself.
The only tiny drawback to this rosy assessment is the reality that YOU are asking for work. And whether it is Tom Jode in Grapes of Wrath or Oliver Twist saying, “Please sir, I want some more,” you are not in a position of POWER to negotiate the best for yourself (money, hotels, meals, equipment etc.), and that is why – when you can – it really does make sense to turn your booking over to an agent once you have reached a certain level of success. What is that level? Depends upon the artist and the music. What is essential is that you DO NOT FALL ASLEEP at that point. THE IS HUGE, once you have an agent, you are literally placing your life in that person’s hands. They are your travel agent, your survival provider, and your happiness or misery provider, depending upon on how well they listen to your needs and match those with market reality (the buyer’s needs), and your budget. In Colorado, we have some exciting new booking agencies like Fairfield or Sweetwine and some national agencies like Madison House. We also have a whole lot of ‘middle agents’ or brokers who work between buyers and artists to put the two together. And then there are some classic long-time agents like Road-Dwag who have been around and doing it well for years.
So don’t be afraid to book yourself, and also don’t ever let go of the controls on your career when you do sign with an agent you trust. In the long YOU are responsible for YOUR career, no matter who you hire to help you achieve success.
Category: Shop Talk
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