How to Organize a Rock Tour

There’s nothing like connecting with an audience. You can plaster your band’s mp3s all over the place, but playing live is what music is all about. Music needs an audience. A rock tour can be the best promotion a band ever gets.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• A band
• A van

1. Hire a tour manager. Not always possible—if you’re just starting out, your tour manager might just be your drummer.
2. Get a club list for clubs all over the country. Be realistic—if you’re a new band, you’re going to play in a club with a 500-person capacity or less. If you can fill up a 1000 seat place or more, you’re probably going to need a tour manager. Look into coffee houses, colleges, street fairs, and other venues as well.
3. Hook up with other bands. This is why band networking is important. Either find local bands you know who are playing shows—you can tour with them for a brief leg of the tour--or else find a band to tour with for the entire tour. This will help pool your resources for promoting the tour and setting dates. Ideally, you’ll hook up with a band with a following to be the headliner.
4. Promote the tour ahead of time. Contact local radio stations—college, public, and commercial. Also contact the local weekly and music magazines for a possible interview. You could buy ad space as well. If you know people locally, get them to post flyers around town and/or hand them out.
5. Don’t set tour cities too far apart. Connect the dots: don’t book Chicago, then Dallas, then Minneapolis. Keep the cities close together. Also, make sure the tour dates are close together—a city a night, if they’re close together.
6. Book motels in advance. For new bands, it’s not uncommon to 1. Sleep in the van or 2. Find someplace to crash at each show.
7. Set a budget for each day—food, cigarettes, drinks, lodging. Keep a log—if you don’t spend the limit one day, let it roll over into the next.
8. Collect money after the show as soon as you possibly can.

Tips & Warnings

• The van: custom build the van so there’s a sleeping area. Bunk beds work well, with the gear underneath.
• Design an all-purpose flyer where information can be filled in for each stop on the tour.
• Get someone to sell merch—t-shirts, CDs, stickers. This person can also act as a roadie to load up and break down equipment.
• It’s a good idea to not make your van scream “rock band” with graffiti, stickers, and the like. The van’s probably going to be parked in some bad parts of town with thousands of dollars of equipment.