For music venues, booking great bands is only half the work

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The smaller the band, the more they rely on live music venues.

While successful acts have an easier time mobilising a fanbase it can be very hard for an up and coming band to fill a venue.

Ideally, a small venue can find at least 30 people for an unknown great band at any time.

It is not enough to invite cool new bands to your stage.

As a venue, if you are working with new talent you have to do all you can to make sure there is an audience on the night of the show. That is why it is important that venues actively invest in audience development.

You should scout for potential audiences the way you scout for new bands.

  • What does your audience look like?
  • What is it they need that you can offer?
  • How can you build a better relationship with them?

When you are trying to deepen your relationship with your audience it is crucial that you understand where they live. Not (just) physically, but in terms of where they get their information.

The conversation you have with your audience begins way before you are trying to sell the first ticket.

Audience development is the key to growing your small venue, both in terms of vistors and in terms of artistic styles.

If audience research sounds like boring marketing babble, try and look at it like this:

Most music venues have an explicit love for the bands they book.

Then why would you not want to show the exact same interest in the audience that comes to see them?

Want to build new audiences for your music venue? Here are three things to keep in mind.

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The music speaks for itself, right?

Live music venues do not have a tradition of audience development. Deep down we believe that if you put on great shows, the crowds will come.

It doesn’t work that way.

Precisely because we are so passionate about the music we put on, live music venues can get stuck in a closed loop. You start to think your audience consists of the type of people who like what you do. And that if you pick great bands, the audience will automatically follow.

Closed loops always lead to a dead end. It’s the law of diminishing returns.

If you don’t actively seek new audiences, who is going to come to your venue 5 years from now? Let alone 15 years from now?

Here are three principles for building new audiences for your venue.

  1. Be curious. Remember when you started out listening to your favourite bands? How you delighted in discovering new stuff? Cultivate that mindset for new genres and styles. Building new audiences means growing your curiosity for them. What do they need? How can you help them?
  2. Start from love. Don’t just tick off boxes. Actively move from ‘It doesn’t hurt that you are here’ to ‘I WANT you in my venue’. This also means being really picky about the kind of new audience you invite into your house.
  3. Adopt the gardener’s mindset. The world no longer needs gatekeepers. People care about the music, not about your opinion of the music. Instead try lovingly looking at the music that is happening around you and thinking “how can I help this grow”?

If it is true that the music speaks for itself, then audience development is about actively listening to what new music has to say.

Why you should get on that Zoom call with a European colleague in the music industry today

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It took a virus to teach the music industry how to do video calls.

In Europe restrictions are slowly being lifted for live music venues. The future might not look as bright as we had hoped yet, but at least we are looking at a future. Not too long ago that wasn’t the case.

Rebuilding a European live music scene will take a lot of effort.

More than ever it will require international cooperation between cities, music venues and media.

  • Cities are putting policies into place to encourage live music. Governments should help music venues to thrive again. It makes sense for policy makers to talk to their European counterparts to learn from each other how to do that.
  • Music venues can leverage the fact that the next year is going to be mostly about smaller local shows. They should work together on a European level to set up tours for European bands.
  • Radio stations and broadcast media in Europe now have the chance to promote European artists more than ever. Ideally live music bridges the gap between broadcast media and people meeting in real life again. This too will require international cooperation.

The next couple of years are going to be about rebuilding music scenes.

Undoubtedly there will be a focus on localism. But at the same time we have to make sure that we learn from each other more than ever.

Localism cannot mean parochialism.

If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it is that our international partners are but a Zoom call away these days.

So let’s invent this future together.
Who are YOU giving a call today?