Being involved in the music industry can be a very exciting thing to do. When you are working as an event manager, you will be dealing with artists one on one. Booking musicians can seem like a difficult thing to do if you have never done it before. However, with just a little bit of research, booking a musical act can actually be quite an easy thing to do. Learning how to book A musician can be a fun and important thing to do for your career as an event manager.
Research Your Artist(s)
The first thing you have to consider when booking a musician is their relevancy. Are they popular in your area? Do they currently play on the local radio stations? Will they sell tickets? You need to make sure that you ask these questions before booking an artist. Contacting local radio stations to ask who they are most frequently playing can be a great idea for knowing which bands are doing well in your area. You can also contact the musician you are looking to book and ask them if they have specific geographic information on their fanbase. Many social media platforms will now allow musicians to see where their fans are coming from. This can help you to see if they indeed do have fans in your area.
Many event managers may fall into a type of thinking that just because they are really into a band everyone else will be. As an event manager, you need to keep everyone’s interests in mind. Your favorite band from the 80s probably won’t have the same fan base they did when they were at the peak of their fame. It is much more important to book a musical act that is going to have mass appeal. This will help you to have a much more successful concert. In the long run, this will end up helping your career greatly. The ability to choose popular musical acts will set you apart as an event manager who can really perform well at their job.
Securing the Artist Contract
Contacting an artist’s manager is much more professional than trying to contact them directly. Most artists will have their manager’s contact information listed on their website or social media pages. Talking to their manager will be a much easier thing to do as well. Artists are usually worn out from late hours touring or recording. Talking to their manager will get you where you need to go a lot faster than if you were to try and deal straight with the musician themselves. Corresponding via email is the best way to reach a manager. Even if they do have their phone number listed, they most likely will not answer their phones due to their busy schedule.
One thing that you will need to be particularly cautious of is the contract rider that comes along with booking a band. There are some bands that have very meticulous requests in their contract riders. Contract riders will usually indicate who is responsible for things like sound, lighting, and stage set up. There are also some musical acts that will have a booking fee hidden in their rider that can cost just as much as their original artist fee. You could end up having to pay twice as much for an artist than you originally thought. Always be sure to look over the rider thoroughly before committing to anything. If a particular stipulation feels excessive or won’t be possible, don’t be afraid to negotiate with the booking agent.
Promoting an Event
One of the biggest things that event managers forget to add to their contracts is a provision for marketing. Artists need to understand that it is important for them to promote your upcoming event on their social media. It doesn’t do any good for a musician to have hundreds of thousands of followers if they are not helping to promote your event. Be firm on this point. Ask your artist to share your event’s link on their social media pages and maybe even express their excitement about the upcoming show. The more excitement they encourage from their fan base, the better your tickets will sell.
Other promotion ideas include the artist making a video expressing their enthusiasm about your event. This can be shared on the event’s website and social media pages in addition to the artist’s social media page. These videos tend to elicit an excellent response from ticket buyers. For more help with promotion check out on articles on festival and concert promotion!
Learning how to book bands will get easier over time. You will find that your confidence will rise with the more bands you book. As your experience grows, you’ll also get a better feel for the type of booking practices that are most common in the music industry. Over time, you will know just the type of bands you can book with your certain budget. Just like anything else in your career, the more time you spend researching and practicing booking musicians, the better you will become.
