How to Choose a Rock Venue

Series Summary

Finally, the big day has arrived. You roll out of bed at 3 in the afternoon, reach to the coffee table to grab your Black Sabbath wrist bands hidden in the midst of beer bottles and cold pizza, and jump to the clothes covered floor with your fist already raised to the sky. After standing in front of the mirror for an hour listening to Metallica's Black Album, you put tattered clothes on, throw your Gibson Les Paul and Marshall Half Stack in the back of your Honda Civic and drive into the sunset to make Rock n Roll history. After a gruesome sound check and frequent arguments about where to put the microphone, you finally look up to your masses of fans to find only a middle aged, slightly balding man standing in the back grumbling and pacing. With a broken heart not even Jimmy Page and all his black magic could heal, you drive home, dejected and alone asking, “If rock happens at a bar, but nobody's around to hear it, does it still rock?”

In this free video series, watch as rock n' roller and out of controller David Jackel teaches how to book a rock show. Are you tired of just playing for the bartender? These step by step music business lessons will turn you into a rock god in no time. Learn how to promote electronically, where to put fliers, how to write a review, how to get radio promotions, and spread the word by word of mouth. Unfortunately, playing rock shows is not as easy as “if you build it, they will come.” For a successful show, just as much work needs to go into promotion as practicing and the experts at Expert Village want to help.

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm here to talk to you about selecting a venue for a rock show. Now the purpose of the venue is to connect you with an audience, so you want to find the right venue. The place that's going to bring you to the audience that suits your music and suits your drah. So, the first thing you're looking for is size. You want to pick a venue that's the right size, and by this I mean, if you have a big draw, of course, you want a larger venue. But, let's say that you are a new act and you don't have many fans or you've been around for a while, but you're not going to bring more than forty people to a show. If that's the case, you want to pick a smaller venue, because, a smaller venue is going to fill up more easily and the venue isn't going to give you trouble for having less of a draw, if it's a small venue to begin with. On the other hand, if you have a lot of equipment, you don't want to pick a venue that's too small because then not everything is going to fit on the stage. I once played at a place that was so small that half of our equipment was actually out off the stage among the audience. So, make sure that, even if you're looking for a place that's small that it has a decent sized stage. The next thing you're looking for is style. You want to pick a venue that matches your style and by this I mean, if you're a heavy punk band, you don't want to be playing at a jazz club and vice versa. So, pick a club that's suited to the type of music that you're doing. Otherwise, it's a waste of your time and the audience's time and chances are you won't be invited back. And finally, you want to pick a club that suits your age group. So that when you're on the phone talking to promoters, find out what generally the age group is. For example, if you have a younger crowd, you don't want to go to a club that is usually twenty-one plus, because then your fans can't get in. On the other hand, if your crowd is mostly people who are over forty years old, you definitely don't want to go play at a club that's catering mostly to teenagers, because then they are going to feel out of place and it's just not a good combination."