Booking

A lot of musicians want to play colleges, but most don't really know what that means. As someone who has played over 100 official university sponsored shows around the country, it's a field I know quite intimately. From the schools surrounded by a hundred miles of corn to the tho...

I'll admit it. I'm horrible when it comes to email. I have a contact form on Ari's Take which I was pretty good at keeping up with when I launched the site 3 years ago. But now I'm about 6 month behind on responses. Yikes. Even my personal email I get backed up on - to the point...

You know where to play locally. You've been to most clubs and have made mental lists of the venues you'd like to play. Some of them are venues you want to pursue now and some you set as ones to work for when your fan base is a bit bigger. Some you've played and have vowed never t...

Between 2006 and 2009, brothers Kyle and Bryan Weber had played (and booked) over 600 shows with their band Zelazowa. From conversations they had with other bands they met on the road about the best venues to play in various cities, the Weber brothers got an idea. Because there r...

We're nearing the holidays and musicians have been asking me what rates they should pitch to buyers who request their services. Be it a corporate holiday party, rotunda in the mall or a corner in a restaurant. This is an entire business in it of itself. I have friends, well, one...

Not two hours after I posted my Should You Pay To Play article, I happened to received this email from an LA 'promoter.'Here is how our conversation went...T's response:Ari. This is an EXCELLENT post. There's definitely a stigma associated with pay to play. But respectfully, I dr...

I live in LA. I've only been here 3 years, but in that time I've met many excellent musicians in town all talented enough to explode at any moment. The sad reality is, in a town so saturated with incredible musicians, the cream isn't necessarily rising to the top as quickly as it...

I (digitally) sat down with Kyle Weber, one half of the brother-Weber founders of Indie On The Move, to discuss their excellent booking resource for DIY musicians. As I wrote in Booking Your Own Tour: A How-To Guide, I used their site when booking recent tours and found it to be...

Last year I went on two national tours covering 40 states and played over 100 shows. I booked nearly every show. It was my first time visiting about 30 of the cities and many of the other cities' venues I had never played before. Both tours were financially successful. Let me sa...

Building a fan base is a daunting task. Just reading that sentence your blood pressure probably rose a couple points. Everyone talks about how it's so important to 'build a fan base,' but no one really gives a simple way how or what that even really means.You should not look at t...