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Workshop: What Bookers Want – Band Promo 101 ONLINE
BAND PROMO 101 – A workshop to help you stop pissing off bookers and promoters and get more gigs. Sunday, April 4, 12:30pm – 4:30pm Sadleir House Lecture Hall, 751 George Street North
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Workshop: Band Promo 101 – Toronto
BAND PROMO 101 – A workshop to help you stop pissing off bookers and promoters and get more gigs.Saturday, March 23, 12:30pm – 4:30pmTrinity-St. Paul’s United Church and Centre for Faith, Justice and the ArtsThis venue is physically-accessible. The closest subway station is Spadina.We encourage women, racialized people, LGBTQ people, to attend. Workshop Fee $50; limited scholarships available. Contact candace@secretfrequency.ca for details BUY TICKETS HERE Promoters, Bookers, Agents, and Publicists may love your music, but may be quietly cursing you as they try to promote you. Do you have your promotional materials in place? Are they the right things? Do you know what you need? Do you know why it’s…
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Some thoughts about – and a good, green idea for – Music Submissions
There was a time, 15 years ago, when the wealth of CDs that suddenly started coming my way, as a full-time booker at a dive bar, was exciting and fun. Opening packages mailed from across the country was exciting – who knew what fabulous undiscovered gem was lurking inside that yellow padded envelope? Now I find myself looking at CDs – or any physical media music submissions – with a sense of weariness. The thrill of discovery is still strong, but it’s sometimes overwhelmed by the knowledge that every CD and paper package represents a use of resources that isn’t very smart or justifiable. I know there are some bookers/DJs/industry…
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A brief commentary on band websites and bios
I get a bit frustrated when I’m working to promote a band and they don’t have what I need in an easily-accessible format. Considering that all promoters are looking for the same things from artists, it always boggles my mind a bit when I can’t find what I’m looking for an an artist’s site, or when their bio is so poorly-written that it’s unusable. Remember when writing your bio that you’re talking to several audiences – fans, bookers/promoters, and media. Make sure that what you’re writing would be interesting and useful to those audiences – are there descriptive sentences that reporters and promoters can use to tell their audiences…
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Women in Music Database
One of the discussions that arose from the Women in Music at FMO meetup in October was that a lot of women in the industry are looking for other women to work with – as producers, as side players, etc. It also seems to me that conferences and festivals who are asked or challenged on the issue of gender parity often say things like ‘We can’t find enough women to fill these spots.’ So with the aim of helping each other and promoting women in music, I’m gathering a database of women and the things they do in the music industry. Paid or volunteer, it doesn’t matter; if you identify…
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What goes in an EPK?
It’s Autumn, the time of year when an artist’s thoughts turn to next Summer’s gigs. You’ve come off the road for the year, and you want to make sure that the promotional material that you’re putting out there is working for you. And you’re thinking of creating – or re-assessing – an EPK. An Electronic Press Kit is a page on your website that provides resources for bookers, media, and technicians. My theory is that a website, overall, is for personal interaction with fans, but the EPK page on your website is for your professional interactions. It’s for someone in a hurry who sees literally thousands of band sites and just wants…
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Musicians: It’s worth paying artists.
You’re a musician; you work hard to hone your craft, you practice, you rehearse, you write and re-write, you book your own gigs and manage your website and do your own promo, and when you make some money you plough it back into your work, upgrading your gear, fixing the car, paying rent on your rehearsal space. You’ll fiercely defend a musician’s right to get paid, making jokes – sometimes bitter – about driving $5000 in gear in a $500 car to a gig where you’re paid $50. You lament the culture of free music – people so used to downloading Kanye illegally that they forget that most musicians do not…
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My Rules
I’ve been a music booker for a while now, ((People have even paid me to do it at places like The Montreal House, The Peterborough Folk Festival, Harbourfront Centre, and The Distillery Historic District.)) and over the years I’ve developed some guiding practices that govern most of what I do – something I think of as my rules for booking. I tend to stick to these rules because they work, and because whenever I’m unsure, I’ve got them to point to true north. Other bookers are their own people, and I neither expect that they’d adhere to this exact set of ideas nor do I think any of these are…
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Folk Music Ontario Conference
The Folk Music Ontario Conference ((Formerly the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals!)) is an annual event that draws just under a thousand artists, presenters, and other music industry people to hang out together, jamming, learning, and talking music for four days every October. It’s always a highlight of the year, a chance for bookers, promoters, writers, and DJs to hear some of the best emerging touring acts in one place over one weekend in one hotel. This year, the conference takes place in Mississauga, Ontario. Secret Frequency founder and writer Candace Shaw will be in all of her usual haunts at the conference – wherever there’s good music or good…
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Help Me Promote You
This article first appeared on RootsMusic.ca in 2010. You can view the original here. Last month, when talking about methods of submission to presenters, I wrote “I would… give a lot of thought before booking anyone who has not at least made an attempt at a professional presentation.” So, does how you appear and present yourself matter? Well, of course it does. It matters in every single social interaction you’ll ever have, and influences the way people perceive you on a very basic level. But setting that aside, how does it affect your artistic career? I know we’re all here for the music, and the other stuff is seen as often…
