Many of the ideas inside of here were developed through extensive discussions with bands and individual artists as well as the monthly Bandcampus sessions.  The venue listings were obtained through publicly listed information and a great thanks goes out to Katie Brown for helping to compile it all. All of the information contained within this ebook is something that I feel every band could use so I’m posting it for free.

Free eBook on Booking Your Band in Texas

If you like this ebook and find it helpful, please consider blogging a link back to this post so that peole know where to get the book. If you’d like to share copies with someone else, please point them to this post instead of the file directly so that I can make edits without concern.

Also, if this book makes you happy please leave a comment below this post. I’d love to know what you think about the work.

Thanks!

Booking Your Band in Texas (pdf format).

P.S. If you’d like just the venue listing without the helpful guidance on how to book your band, leave a comment below so I know how many people would like the venue listing in a google document format.

Release Schedule
Every day of this week, beginning on Monday, a new guide will be released for Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Victoria/Corpus Christi. If you come to Bandcampus on Sunday you’ll receive the full document, similarly, if you visit this site next Monday (2/1) you’ll be able to download the document in its entirety. On Monday, February 1st, the complete list of venues will also be posted as a google document so that anyone can access it and edit it for accuracy.

The Free ebook
On Monday, 2/1/10, the compiled version will be available as an ebook for free download. The full document includes the following:

• Venue Listing for Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Victoria/Corpus Christi
• Mad-Libs style email script to assist you in making first contact with a venue to book your band a live show
• Mad-Libs style phone script to assist you in making first contact with a venue or following up to book  your band a live show
• A recommended schedule to help you plan your bookings
• A basic explanation of how to go about contacting venues and booking your band a live show

If you like what you read, please consider blogging a link back to this post so that people  know where to get the document. And if you’d like to provide some ideas about the document, feel free to leave a comment at the end of this post.

Acknowledgements
This guide was compiled over 2009 with the assistance of many people: Lauren Oakes laid the early groundwork for this project in early 2009 by compiling the list for Houston. My intern Katie Brown is largely responsible for the project as it exists today, expanding the listings to cities within a four hour drive of Houston, organizing the data, and fact checking the listings. Attendees of Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY in July got a first look at the listings and gave it a review for typos and missing information. Those bands and others that deserve thanks are: .
Prairie Cadets, Montgomery Walker, Stateside Stereo, Western Civilization, The Favorites, , The Liquid Kitchen, Female Demand, Glasnost, Insert Name Here, Spin Alley, Joe Muscara, The Snake Charmers, April Kyle, Ajit D’Sa, Wayside Drive, Ned Dodington, Grace Rodriguez, and last but not least the members of Caroline Collective, and Houston’s Creative and Music Community.

Licensing
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This means:
Use this guide as much as you like to book shows for yourself and others. Share it with your friends, reproduce, download, redistribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this guide but the original work must be credited and you may not sell it. All further derivatives are licensed under identical terms.

Booking Your Band in Texas Guide by Matthew Wettergreen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

There are few bad reasons to tour. It gives you the opportunity to connect with fans you don’t run into every day. It allows you to promote your new album or EP. It gives you the opportunity to test out new material or hone old standards to an audience of people who will give you visual and realistic feedback. It allows you to meet and discuss your music with new people and new bands. It allows you time to digest the material that you’re working on and potentially come up with new material. It pulls you out of your comfort zone and forces you to focus on performance rather than just doing covers of your own songs. According to Jim DeRogatis of Sound Opinions, it’s one of the easiest ways to find out about new artists.

What can touring do for you in your home environment? When you return from a tour you’ll have a new perspective of your performing skills, a better grasp over your old material, ideas for new material, tricks picked up from bands you’ve met, new contacts that can help you further promote your music, closer bonding with your bandmates, great stories, new ideas for your band, (potential) financial gain from merchandise sales, new fans who will listen to your music, prosthletize, consume, attend your shows.

With all those positives you’d think that every band you know would be mounting tours regularly. This isn’t the case and there are several reasons for it. First, it can seem daunting to book and mount a tour. Second, everyone falls back on the economy negatively affecting shows. This is only partly true but it can contribute to an overall perception that touring is more difficult than it should be.

Is touring difficult? It’s certainly not as easy as getting booked and selling out a show in your hometown. It doesn’t have to be as difficult as the widely held perception though. There are hard and fast rules for how to book a tour, promote a tour, execute a tour and have an impact. Some of them will be discussed at the next Bandcamp (link), some others are mentioned here, here, and here. The question is, where do you want your musical career to go?

In the short term, the easiest way to learn how to book a tour, the responsibilities of a touring artist and improving your merchandise sales on tour, is to attend the next Bandcamp. The next installment of Bandcamp will be held at Caroline Collective on January 4th, 2009. The topic will be Touring and we’ll cover the entire process of touring from the booking to the promotion to the execution of the tour and getting home safe and sound. Speakers include Gretchen Schmaltz of Western Civilization, Sara Winter of Warehouse Live and Terry Crane of Commerciant.

*The biggest bonus for members of the Houston music community looking to book a tour is that we’re going to help you do it. Bandcamp will be taking proposals from bands for length of tour, location, budget, goal. From the submitted proposals we will be booking a tour for one Houston band.*

WHEN: January 4th, 2009, 1-3pm

WHERE: Caroline Collective, 4820 Caroline

WHAT: Bandcamp:TOURING