Promotion: how to and how NOT to!

When you are promoting a live event, the ultimate aim of this is to get people to come to the event.  In order to do that there are some vital things to ensure you do properly.  There are also things that can go horribly wrong if you get them wrong.

What are you promoting?

• Will the act bring people in?
• Is the venue a suitable size?
• What about location?

How will you fund it?

• Can you get help with advertising through sponsorship?
• Do you need to put a deposit down at the venue?
• Are you offering guarantees to the act or a door split?

Dealing with the band.

• Do you have their tech spec and have to definitely sent it to the engineer?
• Do they require unusually high ceiling clearance?
• What is the line-up and do they know how much space there is on stage?
• Is there somewhere for them to change/store gear?
• Will you be providing them with a rider?
• If there is more than one act, have you arranged sharing of backline with them to minimise changeover times?
• Have you set aside enough time for soundcheck?

Promoting the event.

• Have you crated a facebook event and encouraged the acts to spread the word?
• Local listings?
• Can you print posters/fliers and put them up in the venue before hand?
• Have you planned a marketing strategy? i.e What info will you put out and how often?

A while ago, I did a show that was 'promoted' by possibly the worse promoter in the world.  Disaster from start to finish.  To begin with, he was very communicative by email, so we were quite confident that he was well organised.  When we got there at 4pm to load in however, no one was at the venue and the bar staff didn't seem to know what was going on.  When he finally showed up (6:30pm?) he didn't even introduce himself to us - I figured out that it was him from his photo on facebook and had to go over and make myself known to him.  We waited around for the sound engineer but he wasn't booked to come in until 7pm.  That meant we had to wait for 3 hours.  Also, doors were at 7:30pm.  It is completely impossible to soundcheck 4 bands in half and hour.  The sound engineer hadn't been sent out specs and said he would have come in earlier if he'd been asked to.  When I gave him our channel list he was quite panicked - the venue didn't have enough mics or channels and he'd have been able to get more in if he'd have known in advance! There was also no where for us to store our instruments.  When I asked him about it, he actually asked me to ask at the bar!

After all this faffing about, we were pretty hungry as we'd been up since 5am and had driven a massive 8 hours from Glasgow to Norwich.  The promoter had said he'd order us pizza in but didn't do this until 8pm, by which time, the first band had almost set up and, as the doors were open, we had to eat it outside in the freezing cold because it wasn't bought from the venue.

Everything was running late and there was a curfew of 11pm so we all had to change our sets to make them shorter at the last minute.  The promoter seemed unable to work out timings either. When we finally did get to line check before our set, we couldn't actually fit on the stage properly because he hadn't realised how much space 8 people take up with so many instruments.  Doh!

All of these things were easily avoidable.  Ok, so he was obviously inexperienced but didn't even try to appear like he knew what he was doing.  Shaking hands with him was like someone dangling a limp mackerel at you.  We each made a point of 'bone crushing' him as we said goodbye!

Proof that Norwich is exactly as Alan Partridge portrays it, if ever there was.