Amazon.com Widgets Tourformation, a Division of Musformation | Daily Musician's News, Tips, Gear, Business & Gossip
Big news for those of you looking to book tours and communicate without running up your cell phone bill. Google is now allowing you to make free phone calls within Gmail using Google Voice (a service I am absolutely in love with). While you may not see it in your Gmail yet they will be rolling out the service in the next few days so keep an eye out for a great new way to communicate. More info here.

Selling Out Shows Every Time You Play

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The Music Think Tank has a fantastic article on playing appropriate shows for your crowd and how to make sure you are not over supplying your live show demand. Check it out here.http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/selling-out-your-shows-every-time.html

Keep Records Of Everything On The Road

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logbook1web2.jpgIt's going to be hard for you to tell if you're breaking even on tour if you don't know how much you're spending. As much of a pain in the ass as it is to keep an Excel sheet, Google Spreadsheet or notebook full of all that data, it can really be helpful in showing you were you're hemorrhaging money. Make notes on how much you spend for food, gas, repairs, and any other incidentals. Keeping good accounting can insure that you don't end up on the side of the road in Wichita, Kansas trying to get your Mom's credit card number so you can buy your band a Happy Meal to split between the four of you. Good records let you know what you're doing right and wrong. Is your van actually getting good gas mileage or should perhaps refrain from running the AC unit 12 hours a day when it's not even that hot outside?  The only way you'll ever know and be able to make adjustments is to keep accurate records from the beginning.

Be Willing To Play Shows For Free

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big_text_for_free.jpgA lot of folks will tell you that you should value your art and that in a psychological sense, when you give something away for free, people value it less. That's a nice arm-chair philosophy, but the reality is that music, and even live music, is everywhere all the time and most people don't have to pay very much (if anything) to get it. People like to think of "market value" as some evil political term that shouldn't be thrown around with something sacred like art, but even art has to face economic realities. By opening yourself up to playing for free you reach a huge group of people that would have never heard your music.

It's important to think of playing free as an investment, not as a waste of time and fruitless labor. Free shows can produce money from merchandise and can add addresses to your email list. Most importantly, it starts word of mouth promotion and gives people a "risk free" trial of your band. The whole "support the arts" movement is fine and dandy, but people only support the arts after they find something they believe in/are excited about - you can't guilt people into coming to your show.

Let's imagine you're a quirky electronic artist in NYC and Modeselektor is coming to town but they have no openers touring with them. Your band has a decent following, but so do 20 other bands like you. Naturally, the competition for opening act slots is going to be fierce, but if you are willing to play the gig for free, the promoter can relax a bit and worry about meeting the headliners guarantee. We've seen this technique effectively used at some of the biggest venues in NYC. After you've built up some more clout and proven yourself at a large venue, you can easily begin asking for a little money, but wait until you've shown the promoter something before getting on your high horse.

Free is never actually "free" - it's a sample of what you can do and an investment in attracting future fans and drawing in revenue. 

More Dates Doesn't Make It A Better Tour

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side-shot.jpgWhen you're a young band just starting out, it's an easy mistake to measure your band's worth by how many tour dates you can rack up and how long you can stay out. However, it doesn't matter if you're playing Asia for a month straight or traveling coast to coast in the US and everywhere in between, if no one shows up to watch you, it doesn't mean anything. Playing live shows is inspiring and invigorating, but that novelty quickly wears off when the money runs out and the crowds stop showing up. A fruitless tour can leave your band frustrated, broke and at each others throats, so don't think that adding a few more dates simply for the sake of making yourself feel better will improve things. Despite all the excitement, tour life can be long and grueling so it's better to start out with something conservative and small and see how you do rather than burn yourself out trying to do too much. While it might stroke your ego to tell your friends back home that you're going out on the road for 90 days, it might not necessarily be the best thing for your band.  

Using QR Codes To Promote Your Music

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Perhaps you are like me and you have been seeing these funny looking barcodes everywhere and giving them a WTF? These barcodes are QR codes, which smart phones can scan with their built-in camera and it will take them to a website of your choice or even put your contact info into a phone automatically, depending on how you set up your QR code. These codes present many cool ways to promote your music:

  • Make one that you hang up at your merch booth where you link a place where fans can get more info on your group.
  • If you know HTML you can make a web landing page where you can trade fans their email address for free tracks.
  • You can put this on promotional posters and flyers so that fans can preview tracks from the groups playing a show.
To generate a free QR code like the one above go to this free site.

So You Wanna Be A Musician

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TicketLeap Expands With Social Functions

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We have long been fans of Ticketleap for its ability to promote your own events and sell directly to fans for a small PayPal commission. It enables many groups who play at off the radar venues to capitalize on advance/online ticket sales. It now looks as if TicketLeap has stepped up their game and added ways to promote your events through social media like Twitter and Facebook making their service a helpful way to spread the word about your shows. Totally kick ass!

Jango Now Offers Concert Tour Date Listings

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gigs1.pngWe are big fans of Jango since we find it to be one of the easiest ways to find new fans for your music. One of the cool new things they are allowing you to do is add concert dates to your page. This way if fans are looking you up and listening to your channel they can easily find when they can see you. Check out their latest blog entry and get the full details.

Your Live Show Strategy Is Insane

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tumblr_l6cbyalkWD1qaalxco1_500.jpgThe definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Yet you will constantly see bands drive from town to town where they have no fans on a Tuesday night and expect a miracle where to roll in to town and play a sold out show.

This is indeed sanity and like many insane things in this world we watch many loved ones and friends do this on a day to day basis. Tour:Smart author Matin Atkins has a great saying when he talks about how you shouldn't take your country to war unless you know the outcome. Many bands have their momentum, wallets and time drained by driving for days to places that don't care about seeing them in order to fill some myths about paying some sort of dues.

The fact of the matter is if you are going to play a show somewhere and it has a bad turn out, don't play there unless you are going to do something different. If you played a town and no one came don't go back till you are sure the situation will be better. There are many people who believe a record company is going to be impressed that you played hundreds of shows even if it is to 12 people every night. They would much rather see you playing smart gigs where you make situations happen where there is a decent turnout. That 6 hours you were going to drive to a far off show can often be better spent taking 6 hours to talk to other bands who could help make you draw in that town and organizing a great show where you will do something productive for you group!

Topspin Ticketing - Pixies @ The Troxy, London June 2010 from ian rogers on Vimeo.

Yesterday, Topspin offered a glimpse into something we knew they were doing but hadn't quite seen the big picture of. They are now enabling artists to sell tickets direct-to-fan which could knock down many of the walls and profit problems in the industry. While the technology is cool and all and in TopSpin's blog post they claim they don't intend to threaten the big ticket companies, this is indeed the Achilles Heel of the big ticketing companies.

We all know that music fans despise the insane ticket charges that Ticketmaster/LiveNation inflict upon people who just want to enjoy music. This puts the power for artists to finally maximize the potential of both retaining fans and getting bargaining power for artists to get more of a cut from live shows. The groups have always been the people to drive the sales to a show, but since they hold no power over the situation. With direct ticket sales groups can negotiate higher pay outs and better terms as well as eliminating the horrific middle man of a Ticketmaster/Livenation. We are excited to say the least.  

Book Gigs Online For Free With GigMaven

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GigMaven is currently available for NY, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Ohio and are looking to expand further.  For more information check out the GigMaven website.

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Oh Jeez, as you may have heard there are tons of rumors that Google will go into the ticket sales business. Unfortunately, they are using MySpace to show the results for tickets that are available when you Google Search your favorite band. This unfortunately means that you have yet another reason to keep updating your MySpace page.
ohsleeper.jpgThe realities of touring can be pretty um.... REAL. Shane from the band Oh Sleeper shows off the economic side of how bad this can be on a band today. Pop over to the jump and see a post from Facebook.

Announcement - We Now Have a Forum!

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Finally! We now have a forum where you can discuss the new music business, gear, websites and promotion tactics for your music. Todd and I often talk about our disgust with many of the forums today in the music biz. Unfortunately, mods let trolls and negativity run rampant in fear of alienating their users instead of trying to create a positive and productive environment. Our goal with the Musformation Forum is to curate discussions that are positive and intelligent in the music community. Feel free to go there and discuss anything about music. Enjoy.
ODB.jpgThe question on many band's mind is when do you stop putting money into the band and start taking some money to live off. If you have gotten anywhere near this point it is probably a very pressing issue, since your life is probably fully consumed with band work leaving little time for your "real job".  If you have hit this point congratulations since it is rare. Let me help you figure out when to start cutting the pay roll checks errr.... or dolling out the scraps. 

CMJ Artist Registration Deadline July 14th

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cmj_logo.jpgYes, it's already that time of year and if you're anything like us, you're so busy that you almost forgot.  Tuesday July 14th marks the last day for artists to register for CMJ,  being held in NY, October 19-23rd.  550 slots are available and while it certainly would have helped to have registered earlier, tomorrow is the final day.  One thing that is really pissing some people off is that you must register through the service SonicBids which requires membership at $6 a month at least to maintain (not to mention the cost of registering is $45 itself).  Yikes.  Despite that, for many bands, the "illustrious allure" and chance to get "noticed" is too great to refuse.  So yeah, we'll probably see ya there.   
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It is no secret that online radio is one of the best ways to promote your music. With services like Pandora, Last.FM, Jango, Blip.FM and other services not only can you get your music before the ears of listeners who like the type of music you make, but you can also get paid for your plays as you begin to dominate the online radio airwaves.






It all comes down to this. As you come down to entering the studio and then recording your songs you are now tasked with one of the most difficult balancing acts ever known to man (ok... well maybe to musicians). We have written countless articles on how to avoid many of the pitfalls many musicians fall into when they go to capture their material. Read on and make something great for us all to hear.









With everyday, as the gatekeepers die and the major labels lose power it becomes more and more about just having a great song. This being the case you better start brushing up on your skills! We have assembled a lot of advice and tools for you to use to write better songs on the other side of this link.






When trying to break your music out of your circle of friends and out to the whole world, you are inevitably going to have to take on the hat of doing some publicity for your own music. As you begin to take on this large task there is numerous bits of advice that you may have overlooked on how to do this effectively. We have assembled numerous articles on how to take over the world of music and get it out there.






Now that you actually have songs recorded you need to get them out to the world to be heard. With every day that passes more and more amazing tools become available for artists to do this without the help of a label. We keep an up to date guide of everything you could ever want to know about what you should do in order to make the right choice on how to get your music out to the world.






Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, YouTube all become more and more important everyday (well maybe not Myspace, but contrary to much chatter it is still important to know the most up to date ways to make Myspace feed your other pages). We keep musicians up to date with the most current ways to use all of these social networks to promote your music. If you are not reading our guides to social networks you are missing out on the crucial knowledge of how to promote your music with the most up to date techniques.






What separates the winners and losers is how well you handle playing live and then getting your show on the road. Playing live and touring may seem easy but there are countless pitfalls that one can encounted over time. We show you all the new tricks of the trade as well as wise advice that has been passed down over the years.






Managing a group of people and keeping everyone on the same page and motivated is one of the biggest make or break factors of any sucessful group. There are many emerging tools that can make this easier and we sort through them, all the while dispensing valuable advice on how to deal with your members with minimal chaos.






Getting covered by blogs is fast becoming one of the things that everyone wants to figure out. Sadly, there is not a lot of information out there on how to do just this. We have quite a few articles with the techniques we use to get the bands we work with on to some of the top blogs out there.