How to Sell Out Your First Show - pt. 1

There’s the old adage: “to get a job, you need experience . . . but to get experience, you need a job.” This can feel PAINFULLY true when you are starting out as an artist.

No following?

No released music?

No prior shows played?

. . . Is this you?

That’s okay! This doesn’t need to be a ‘show stopper’ for you having a killer first show.

We were in the exact same place and sold out our venue without any other shows or music released! We had a bunch of songs that we were itching to share, but hadn’t gotten to put anything out yet.

Disclaimer - this can be done even if you’re new to an area, like we were!

In this article series you will find a step by step flow for how to go from zero to sell out. We’ll walk through:

Calibrated Perspective - The Mindset for Concert Success
Venue Selection - Picking the Best First Stage
Targeted Marketing - A Plan to Maximize Your Reach
Stellar Arrangement - Orchestrating a Killer Set and Show
Make It Count - Tips to Make Your First Night a Springboard
Make It Profitable - Pointers for Recouping Some of the Investment
Night Of - Show Up Well, Enjoy Your Show

Have a specific item you are looking at? Let’s honor your time - just click the link and you’ll get jumped to that spot in the article. At the end of each section, you’ll find a summary of key takeaways.

This will give you a strong start, credibility with future venues, and help you launch meaningfully as an artist with a group of excited fans!

Calibrated Perspective - The Mindset for Concert Success

Give yourself a moment’s dose of helpful honesty - no one cares about your music except you...

…yet!

If you are starting from ground-zero, you very well may have only a handful of folks who have actually heard your songs. What I said above might sound harsh, it might sound discouraging, but think of it this way instead:

Congratulations to you for taking the step of wanting to share your creation with others!

What you have made has profoundly impacted you so much that you can’t just keep it within the four walls of your bedroom. I applaud you for wanting to break through those walls!

However, there is a single fact that–if not digested–will be a major roadblock for your first show being a success: you need to be the most excited person about your music.

From today until you stand in front of your packed crowd, you are the energizer-bunny promoter for your own material. At this point in your career, no one will be more excited about your show than you are.

This will take a lot of hard work — most good things in life do! But you will find that the more invested you are, the more joy you can take in the event.

But if you are anything like me, you might have a high hurdle of nerves, self-doubt, second-guessing, and fear of inconveniencing others that you need to hop over.

So what you need is the golden circle.

What is your “Why”? Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle

Motivational speaker and business coach, Simon Sinek, gave a landmark TED talk on the key characteristic among truly impactful leaders and organizations.

He drew a three-ringed circle, like a bullseye. Most of the world, according to Sinek, present an idea by first telling you what they are going to do or make. Then they tell you how they will accomplish that. Finally, they describe why they’ll do this.

According to Sinek, this leaves a lot to be desired. Sinek says that we follow leaders like MLK and we buy products from companies like Apple, not just because of what they are putting forward.

We follow because they have clearly connected why they are doing something in such a way that it touches the deepest part of you.

He says we ought to go:

Why we do what we do → How we do what we do → What it is we are doing

So, in your case:

Why do you want to have a full-on show?

Deeper than that, have you taken the time to begin sketching our why do you want to make (and share) music?

Having answers to these questions (preferably written out) is like holding a compass and a map. It helps you know where you are, where you are going, and keeps you from getting off track.

Everybody’s answer will be different. You might say:

Because I have stories that need to go beyond me
Because I want to learn how to make money performing
Because my friends have encouraged me to stretch myself

And it may be all of these things!

For us, we wanted to move from playing in our garage for friends (though we still love doing that!) because we were hungry to see if our music and performance could stand on its own. We wanted to challenge ourselves to put together a full set list. We wanted to learn how you promote an event.

And, above all, we wanted to share the treasure trove of songs that we had been living with - we wanted to get the songs, prayers, hopes, parties, confessions, and anthems beyond our kitchen and into the ears of the folks we wrote them for.

What is your “why”?

Key takeaways from the section:

Get excited about your show! You have to be the one who cares the most about your music. You have to care the most about getting other people in the room.
Define for yourself why you want to make (and share music) and why you want to have a concert. This will help you keep going when things get hard/stay on track when you hit a crossroads

Thoughtful Prepwork - Laying a Firm Foundation

So, you are excited about your music, and you have a supercharged list of reasons why you want people to hear it. Now, how do you get people in the door?

We probably all have had a teacher, grandparent, coach or parent who has told you that, if you’re going to do something well, it begins before the beginning.

Well, they didn’t say that for nothing! For the most successful concert you are dependent on putting in thoughtful preparations.

This begins with two items:

Where are you going to play?

How are you going to get people there?

Wise venue selection and a robust marketing plan will make it so that you can do the grind-work upfront, and just focus on having a killer performance the night-of.

Venue Selection - Picking the Best First Stage

A candid moment - it can be really hard to book a venue without experience. For us, we emailed, called, and DM’d places for a year before we landed a solo gig.

Why? Well, for us, we strongly prioritized a place that would let us play a solo act. It likely would have been much easier to contact a local artist who had a shoe-in, offering ourselves as an opener.

We also wanted to play somewhere that the audience was there for a show, rather than playing while folks eat a meal or enjoy time at the bar.

So, we are defining “first gig” as: the show where you are carrying the energy of the night and you are the reason people have come.

With this in mind, you might say, “well, how do you pick your ideal venue? Sounds like you get what you get.” And, to a degree, you would be right.

You can’t control a venue’s availability. You can’t dictate their criteria for performers. However, you can control who you reach out to, and how you reach out to them.

For some, it could feel like a lot of pressure to put so much symbolic weight on an initial show - if that is you, then good for you for being self-aware! For us, self-awareness looked like being really stringent about where we were going to play.

Some thoughts

Everybody’s journey looks different. Honestly we kind of didn't do things the traditional way!

It's just as effective to build your way up through local open-mics (and maybe more helpful to spend more time on the front end doing bar gigs, open mics, farmer's markets, etc.).

An equally viable path to what we are about to lay out would be to find a backyard to host all of your friends in. Be creative!

The core thing is building into relationships. Whether it is your fan-friends or local venues, do what you do in the context of relationship.

How to choose a venue

These are the best takeaways we learned from choosing a venue, as well as the “lessons learned” that we wish we had going into finding a venue!

GO TO LOCAL SHOWS - when starting out, the adjective “local” can be a great crowd generator. People love the hometown story, and a venue will often feel better about bringing you on if they are confident that your fans are close enough to make the drive

MATCH YOUR VIBE - Find a place that has a vibe you feel comfortable in - a first show has enough nerves as it is: if you have a heavy metal band, and people are expecting subtle jazz, you might feel a little weird.

WILL YOU SOUND GOOD? - Part of this is doing your research, but some local venues will provide the sound/light setup, and even their own tech . . . but how do other acts sound? Remember: you have to be the expert! If the room has horrible acoustics and the sound system buzzes, that will end up being a reflection on you to your audience, whether or not that seems fair!

VENUE SIZE - How many people does the venue fit? Do you think you could fill it? If it is a massive space, and you think your best crowd is 50 people, your audience might feel underwhelmed. However, an intimate room could make 50 people feel like an incredibly cool atmosphere.

WHO HOLDS THE LIST? - Do you have access to the guest list and ticket sales, or is it run through the venue’s site? For us, we had to ask for a ticket count every few days, and didn’t have insight into who bought a ticket. This made targeted marketing more difficult, because we had low visibility on what outreach resulted in ticket conversions.

WHAT WILL THEY DO FOR YOU? - Let’s face it, we’ve got to earn our keep somewhere. However, any venue worth their salt will offer you more than just some floor space. Will they promote you on their socials? Do they have a bar they’ll run during the show? How much of the ticket sales do they keep? (We were blessed and found a place that let the artist keep 100% of the proceeds, thank you Dover Rock City!) Will they provide lights, monitors, techs, etc.?

RESPONSIVENESS COUNTS - It can be hard to figure out if a venue is responsive before you choose to go with them. However, you will have (should have) a lot of questions for your first show. If it takes 3 weeks and 20 attempts to get a note back on how many tickets remain, it will be trickier to succeed. You absolutely can, it is just best when your venue is your partner.

Maybe you are in a venue-dense area. Make a wishlist and reach out to all of them. If you have a lot of venues in your area, then you probably have an active music scene, and thus might encounter a more flooded market.

Maybe you have one venue in your fifty mile radius. Thankfully, you aren’t made by your venue! If this is you, start with what’s at hand. It is always better to make the best with what is in front of you, then get paralyzed.

How to land the venue

Here are some tips for successfully securing a spot in a venue’s lineup. These are the things that we did do and things we wish we had done that our venue said would have made us even more of a standout.

Let’s dive in:

TARGET THOUGHTFULLY - Do not enter the show/gig game if you are not in the business of personally connecting with people. It doesn’t matter if you are given a general request form or someone’s personal cell phone - there is a human being who is at the other end of your request. Do your research, be a blessing, don’t send 50 venues a single stock email.

HONOR THEIR TIME - We live in a small town. But our small town coffee shop told us they get 10-15 gig requests per-week . . . and they only book shows on Saturday! That means they are getting somewhere between roughly 520 to 780 requests, and filtering down to approximately 50 shows! There is a balance, but: if you send a one-line email, don’t expect a response. If you send a novel, don’t expect a response.

BE PROFESSIONAL - It is a myth to think that working in the performing arts means you can neglect business courtesy. The fact stands that a professional first impression will communicate to the venue: “this is someone who knows how to handle themselves, so they will steward our time and resources (the stage, the equipment, the staff) with respect.”

MAKE YOUR CASE - You have to be a magnet. Pull everything back to why you fit what the venue is looking for. Put forward a clean, concise statement about who you are as an artist/band . . . and why it fits the venue. Give a sense for where your audience is located . . . and why they would fit the venue. Venue connection is the place where individuality and originality need to take a humility pill to make sure you are giving the venue something that will benefit them.

FOLLOW UP - I don’t know if we should be proud of our diligence or if this is a humorous example of how nobody was itching to bring us in but . . . we emailed our first venue for a year before they opened a dialogue with us. And they owned that! When I met the owner in person, he said, “You guys have been trying for a while to get in here. You kept emailing me and DM-ing me and kept appearing in my inbox. But, you know what? Through that you showed me that you understood what my venue was looking for, and you proved to me that you’d work your tail off to bring in an audience.”

SUGGESTED FOLLOW UP CADENCE - Tagging off of the last point. . . we found success by: emailing your contact. Then let a week pass and email again. Be polite and concise and point back to your first email. That note is where you have all your core information that you reference back to with brief follow-on notes. Let a day pass, and then reach out via social media, pointing back to your email. Be professional in this correspondence, since a lot of people use DM-ing as a shortcut when reaching out to venues. After that, email every month or two with relevant information. Point them to your new video, or tell them about a house show you did and how many people you pulled in. Ask easily answerable questions like, “do you foresee an opening in the near future, or should I check back in a few months?” Remember, there is a person who is probably reading this on their phone or email - be a blessing and be persistent!

Keep diving in

Now that you have the perspective set and the venue booked, in part two of the series (coming soon!), we’ll begin digging into the nitty-gritty:

Targeted Marketing - A Plan to Maximize Your Reach
Stellar Arrangement - Orchestrating a Killer Set and Show
Make It Count - Tips to Make Your First Night a Springboard
Make It Profitable - Pointers for Recouping Some of the Investment
Night Of - Show Up Well, Enjoy Your Show

See you there!

How to Sell Out Your First Show - Pt. 1