Band Tips – Booking Your First Tours

Booking Your First Tours

Hey Crew,

Ok, so we’ve gone over some good ways to present yourself and how to go about booking shows for your band in the previous blog update, and if you missed that blog, go have a read of it now before digging into this one here as it flows on from it. The previous blog also touched on a few things to keep in mind when contacting venues and booking agents which I wont go over again here but they definitely carry through, so go take another look.

Click here to read over the ‘Band Tips – Booking Shows’ blog.

Now we’ve done that, let’s take a look at booking actual tours…

When booking your first tours be ready to spend lots and lots of hours behind a computer because it’s going to take up a tonne of your time, but it’s worth it.

So if your band hasn’t played out of town yet, booking shows in new areas is a little tricker than home shows. Because the venues know you’re an out of towner, they know you don’t have your group of friends/ local following to come along to the show and buy drinks at the bar. They know you’re not going to pull many if any heads through the door which is a reality in most cases when doing your first out of town shows. So they are going to want a solid line up of local supports, it’s time to do some research. Before you hit up venues jump online and start sussing out who the cool bands in the areas you want to play are. Get your head around it and put a list together of possible supports that fit the vibe and look like they can help pull a few heads in the door. If it’s your bands first time getting out on the road its smart to have another local band headline taking that last spot on the bill, so get 2 local acts on first, then your band, then a local headliner to finish the night off. Having 3 local bands will give the venue the confidence in booking the show and having your band play 3rd on a 4 band bill means the room won’t be empty when you get up to play your set.

It can be pretty hard to book a full tour right from the start, so a great thing to do is start booking weekends away here and there. A cool thing to do which I did back in my earlier years and was lots of fun is to find a rad band from a city you want to play in that’s at around the same level as you are and invite them to your town as the main support for one of your home shows. Have them over, give them a couch to stay on, take care of them and show some hospitality. In return, they can do the same for you and you can be the main support at one of their home town shows and receive the same treatment. Along with being a smart way to get your first foot-hole in a new city and a crowd to play to when you do, it’s a great relationship builder, a tonne of fun and a cool thing you can now promote which ads a little extra excitement to both shows. It also helps you get those first shows in new towns, so when you start looking to book a tour with multiple weekends of touring all lined up and you send your emails out to the venues, you can say that you’ve already played in that town and have already made some traction.

If the gig swapping things, not for you, that’s cool, you can also just try booking a venue and all the support acts for it. Try it out with one or two shows on a single weekend away to get your head around it and go from there. Doing a few one-off weekenders away and spreading them out will also help start to build your rep for when you do put a full tour together.

So we’ve done a few weekenders away here an there and it’s time to put a string of shows together for an actual tour. Unless your band has blown up (in which case you’re probably not reading this) and you know you are going to pull heads on a weeknight, then don’t book shows on weeknights. In the early days, it’s best to stick to lining up a bunch of weekend shows in succession and playing mostly Friday and Saturday nights. Of course, there are some exceptions to the rule where a particular venue might have a cool regular Thursday or Sunday night thing happening, but in general, Friday and Saturdays nights are the go.

I’ve always tried to book and plan things out like this, let’s say we are going to do an east coast run of 8 -12 shows (a lot at the start I know but we’re here to go hard not mess about), this is how I’d try to plan it… Keep in mind with this planning I’m Sydney based

Weekend 1 – Book shows in regional area’s that are only a couple of hours drive North, say 2 – 4 hours

Weekend 2 – Book shows that have the long drives like QLD, The Goldy & Brissy

Weekend 3 – Book shows in regional area’s that are only a couple of hours drive South say 2 – 4 hours

Weekend 4 – Book shows that have the long drives like VIC, Melbourne & Frankston maybe or something like that

Weekend 5 – Book shows nice and close, finish with a home town riot

So my thought process behind this is spacing things out so it’s not too taxing with driving. One weekend is only a few hours drive, the next weekend is a big one in the car, the weekend after is only a few hours, the next is a big weekend of driving… you get the picture. You don’t have to follow my example above exact but it’s just there as a general example on how you can go about spacing things out.

You might be thinking, damn, that’s whole all a lot of travelling and effort weekend after weekend… but you want to be a touring musician right? This is the kind of stuff you have to do, you have to put the hard yards in (I personally don’t think it’s hard yards, I think it’s fun) and pave your way in new towns and cities, get rad tour posters out with your name on top and a bunch of tour dates underneath and make people pay attention to what you’re doing and show that you are hard-working band so that booking agents, labels, promoters of bigger tours, festivals and the like want to work with you and have you on. You’re not only booking a tour, but you’re also building a reputation and setting yourself up as a band to be taken seriously that is ready to back what they create sonically with the effort it takes to build into a professional touring band. When you start hitting up labels and promoters to get good support slots for bigger bands or onto their festivals, they will be much more likely to take you seriously and pay attention… And if that’s, not your goal and all you want to do is tour, drink some beers and have a blast, then that’s cool too, but this stuff might help you take the party further… And who knows where.

Righto, where are we, we’ve done a bunch of weekender shows out of town here and there, we’ve planned out the area’s we want to now tour in a string of weekenders all linked together for our first full tour, it’s now time to start booking bands and venues. This can be tricky and a real juggling act especially at the start when not many people know you or have worked with you before, or even heard of your band in a lot of cases. Let’s think about lead in time, give yourself a good 5 months ahead of when you plan to actually be on the road to start booking the shows and support bands. Get your list of local bands together and hit them up to see if they’d like to play with you and have some prospective dates for them. This can take some time as lots of bands will decline because they’ve never heard of you, but stick at it and you’ll find some. Also, start contacting the venues with a list of prospective local support acts with a few options of dates, start locking in the most important areas first and then start filling in the gaps around the first shows booked. It can be tricky because a venue will want the list of bands on the bill and the band will want the actual date and venue of the show, you’ve just got to do a little juggling act here and it’ll all come together.

Here’s how an email I’d put together might look like when contacting the venues for this…

Hi (insert booking agents name)

Ryan Miller here from Sydney heavy rock act (insert band name), how’s it going?

We’re booking an east coast tour throughout April in support of our soon to be released single “Ace Of Spades” and I was wondering if any of these dates may be available at Billy’s Big Band Room…. Give a few options

We have already put a list of possible support acts together who are interested including …. bands X, Y, Z

The tour will be backed with a full PR campaign from (insert PR company) and we will be putting a huge effort into promoting these shows along with our latest release to support it.

In the last year (insert your band’s name) have played venues X, Y, Z and have played alongside acts such as (insert any cool bands worth mentioning). Then basically add in any cool info that’s impressive but keep it all brief and to the point. If you have played a show and had a big turn out, let them know about it. Keep the whole spiel to about as many words as I have provided here in this example and if they want to read up more on you they can hit the link we’ll provide below.

Here are some links to our music and socials

Music – (insert link)

Video Clip – (insert link)

Facebook – (insert link)

Website / Bio- (insert link)

Thanks a bunch for your time, I look forward to hearing from you…

You may have noticed in this booking email example I mentioned the tour was in support of a single release, and that I mentioned we were working with a PR company. When doing a tour you’re going to be spending a bunch of time, money and effort on it all and you’ll also be hitting up all these new areas so you might as well take advantage of that and give them something like a new single. This is a great time to release new material and even better, have a rad video clip to go along with that if possible. Give all these new potential fans something to grab on to and keep that you can also use to promote the tour with. So now we’re doing a tour, and a release, we had better tell everyone about it. Do some research and find a PR company that works within your world of sounds and has a good rep, get them to run a campaign for you promoting both the new release and tour. This will not only show the venues that you are trying to book that you have your shit together, but that you are taking the promotion of the tour and show at their venue seriously. Yes it is an added cost, and in this paragraph, we just jacked the cost of this whole exercise up a bunch by adding in a new single/ clip release as well, but it can make quite a difference. It does not mean that you will suddenly have way more people at the shows on your first tour, it may help get a few heads in but remember we’re just starting out. But what it will do is create awareness about you on a much larger scale, which consistently followed up with more touring and releases over time will hopefully grow into something much bigger. Yes, you can run the promo campaign yourself and get good results with the media, totally, but it will take up tonnes of your time and a publicist already has the contact list, the right approach and relationship with the media outlets and will achieve better results. In my opinion, it’s just way better to let the professionals do their thing there. It’s also another thing that shows all the key industry players you are taking what you do seriously.

So we have a tour and support bands all booked, new material, a publicist organised, lets now make sure we have solid artwork to go with it. Make sure all your poster art, bands photo’s, promo vids and any media assets all look amazing. Get all the promo art and tour release assets out a good 2- 3 months before the tour starts and start spreading the word….. This blog’s already been blogging on for a bit now so I won’t dig too deep into this blog topic but I’ll put together a deeper blog about promo a little later down the line. Maybe in the next blog update… BLOG

Remember, putting your first tours together will take tonnes of time, but stick with it and you’ll end up doing some super cool stuff, meeting great people, making awesome new friends and just having a really good time all round. Another thing to keep in mind is there’s going to be some very quiet shows, it’s just a part of it and it will happen. But don’t worry about that, if there are 15 people on the D-floor in Lismore, then go out there and make sure those 15 people walk out of the room going, WTF just happened, that was amazing. All those little shows in tonnes of different places all add up to people in new area’s telling their friends about this sick band from wherever you’re from and how they killed it last night. Some shows will have great numbers and lots will have average numbers at the start, in fact, that will likely happen for the first few tours, but don’t stress about it, just go out there and give it your all and people, and hopefully, all those key players in the industry will start to take notice.

You’ll spend heaps of money, make fuck all back, but trust me, you’ll have a ball.

Now go book your first tour!

Thanks for reading my rambles, Milla