Bar and club owners drive me crazy

You will find out that 95% of club owners or managers are not very good at being professional business people and NEVER return phone calls or call whenever they tell you they will. The worst part about booking gigs is chasing people and all of the nonsense and lies you will have to deal with.

You asked very specific and legitimate questions. However, you are correct in assuming that they want to pay as little as possible. Words of 40 years experience advice - never play strictly for the door only. Also, if you have your own P.A., it is always best to take it along just in case any house system is not what you need or are told it will be be unless you have already checked it out in advance. However, it is good to have backup equipment just in case something goes wrong. I have had that happen with in house systems where they don't work right and the venue did not have backup gear and we had to bring in our gear.

 

+1. IME, everything else Richland123 said is correct, too. But especially the part about them typically being non-professional. All that really works, again IME, is a personal agreement with a signed contract followed by a handshake - in person. Be prepared to complete the deal while you are standing across the bar from them. And then you can sit and wait for them to call on the agreed-upon cancellation date (or even later) and cancel! (Also, IME) Maybe you need to set your sights (and your sites ) a little higher. Usually (not always) the bigger a place is, the more often they have bands and the more they pay, the more professional they are.

 

Welcome to world of trying to get gigs for your band. Being one of the people that books my present band. And having years of experience booking my past bands I have learned one very vaulable thing. You have to be persitant. That is the only way you will get gigs. Don't give up.

 

Don't talk to somebody every day or they will get annoyed with you. There is a fine art to booking a group in a professional manner. Also, never act like you are desperate for gigs. They will take advantage of you if they sense that. In addition, never lie about your band and make promises that you can't deliver such as you will guarantee to pack a venue or you can play anything, etc. Once you get a bad reputation, it will follow you. Club owners and managers do speak to each other just as bands do. You always want to establish a positive and professional reputation in spite of all of the horrible things that can and will happen to the band along the way. Be a class act.

 

You can never be annoying enough IMO. The squeeky wheel gets the grease. If it's a place that my band wants to play real bad I will even go to the club to try to find the person in charge of booking it and try to talk to them in person. Sometimes the people who book the bands like that because it shows that you are persitant and will probrably do a good job playing in thier club. And you will try to bring people there to see your band. Which is real important to the club owner.

There will be a lot of times were you just have to give up and accept that you are probrably not going to get booked at certin clubs. But don't let that discourage you.
Just move on to the next one.

 

If I'm trying to book us into a place, I will call the place to find out who books the bands and when they are going to be there in person. Then I will show up, ask to meet with them, buy myself a beer, and bring along the band calendar, press kit & demo, and a fill-in-the-blanks contract. If they won't commit in person, I will make an appointment to visit them again in a week. A week later, I will call to make sure they are there in person, then I will visit them again with the fill-in-the-blanks contract. Sometimes they will never commit, but many of them will when they see you in their joint and spending money.

I don't know how things work in your part of the country, but around here many of the places do all their booking on one or two days for the next 4 or 6 months. You obviously need to find out when that is. I have found that a bartender who is NOT the owner, manager or booking manager is often your most reliable source of information about their place, its policies and booking schedule.

 

This is so true. Don't waste lots of time and effort chasing a place forever that does not seem overly interested and won't pan out anyway when you can use that work on other places. You have to play the law of large numbers and contact as many places as possible (especially a new band) but it never ends since places come and go frequently and you should always be searching for new venues. For every 100 you contact, hope that a few will come through. It is like planting seeds, plant as many as possible, nurture and work them and some will come to fruition and some will die on the vine and never result in a gig. Some will happen quickly, some will take a long time, and some will never happen.

 

^ ALL excellent advice. You have got to EYEBALL these people. If you want gigs, eyeball the person that books the bands. They will easily ignore you if you call or e-mail, or snail mail. They dodge you just like some people dodge creditors. Think about it, although you will probably make them money (and you should), all they think about is having to pay you, and therefore they just think, oh well I will deal with that later. It is a lot harder to ignore someone that is looking at you.

 

Some places are booked by people in whom, let's say, professional competence is still a work-in-progress.

Still, it goes both ways. Most people that handle booking field unsolicited calls from a lot of bands that are flakes, screw-ups, have no draw, or even actively clear rooms with their own brand of still-developing competence.

I'm not defending clubs that don't return calls, but if you were getting called daily by every band within 100 miles, your enthusiasm for chatting up unknown new bands might dip.

 

This made me laugh my @$$ off. Thank you for that obvious truth.

 

You need to do some homework. If you know some other bands that play these places, ask them these questions. Owners and bar managers are quick to avoid anyone who requires their time.

 

as a musician who's father has owned bars/restaurants my whole life i've seen plenty of flakes. also you have to take into consideration the amount of energy it takes to run a bar/club/restaurant correctly, some people im sure are just trying to book bands for as low as possible, some probably just forget to call back b/c of other meetings/business reslated issue's. most bars make money off alcohol and food sales; yea a band can boost these occasionally, but if the bar isnt set up specifically to have bands playing a few nights a week the owners most likely just forget and concentrate on crap like liquor reps, city regulations, stopping fights, dealing with drunks, and constantly counting how much has been stolen from them by their own employees. personally i would just take what you can get keep up your promoting and hope to get more shows the more you can spread the word about your band

 

It's a struggle. That's why people hire agents. Know any good agents?? No....So you end up doing it yourself. Yes, you can be too irritating. In fact the only way to assure that you can get away with being irritating is to make the owner a lot of money. Once you do that you can be as irritating as you want to.

 

A lot of venues can book their club with the same rotation of bands and have no need to give new acts a chance.

One of the better ways to get gigs at a new venue is to befriend an established band that has a similar fanbase and get them to agree to have you open up for them.

Most established bands have good enough relationships with the clubs they play to provide input as to who plays with them. Plus this takes some work off the club as they book one headliner and the headliner takes care of the rest.

Once you have your foot in the door at the club, and assuming you're good, it's pretty easy to get in with the booking agent/manager/etc. to establish a relationship for additional shows.

Just make sure you return the favor to other new bands once you have the relationships established.