Matthew Wettergreen dot com» education

Bandcampus: 1/31/10 BOOKING PARTY Recap

matthew — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:21:00 +0000

Yesterday’s Bandcampus was a loud celebration of touring and music careers between over 15 bands and a mix of Houston music writers. As this was the first Bandcampus of the year people were understandably excited to share their progress with each other and it didn’t hurt that Marc Brubaker brought a keg of St. Arnold’s.

The following bands were in attendance:

The session began late as printing of the ebooks took longer than expected (85 pages each!!!). Thanks to Jeremy Osborn of Wayside Drive for helping with the cover and the printing transport. Ebook copies went fast, the ones who came late had to share it and wait for it to be made available online (later today). We reviewed the process of booking a live show, beginning with two assumptions, 1) each band had prepared a digital toolbox of press, bio, pictures, media, stage setup to send to bookers or promoters as needed. 2) if the band had contacts or relationships with other bands or booker/promoters in desired cities, that would be the first place to start when booking a live show, aside from the following process. Then, we reviewed the planning steps for booking shows; selecting desired dates and targeting venues based on genre similarities and the size of venue. Next we talked about the phone follow-up, the importance of writing out a script and remaining to-the-point and professional. For each of these steps we highlighted the specific sections of the ebook for the bands to refer to later.

During the discussion session, before getting down and contacting venues, several points were raised by Golden Cities, I-45 and Glasnost, three bands who have set up everything from their own shows to regional and national tours.

Lance and Marcus of Golden Cities say: the most difficult thing is getting venues to reply. You have to understand and get over the fact that not everyone is going to reply to your email ever.
Chuck of Glasnost recommends also having a standard contract for your band as part of your digital toolbox. Glasnost compiled theirs from several different examples available online. Here is an article from Music Biz Academy with several example contracts
All bands agreed that asking for money can be the most difficult part and that the actual rate is completely negotiable and situational. It is not recommended to play for free though.

Additionally we had several members of the media in attendance:

The most rousing portion of the entire session was the discussion that ensued when Houston Press Music Writer Craig Hlavaty stood up and let bands know that they needed to take better advantage of the musical infrastructure that exists to help them:

Music writers love to write about local bands, local bands seem to not understand this or take advantage of this opportunity
Craig spends a ridiculous amount of time looking at venue and band sites to find out who is playing and when, because venues don’t list it themselves
Local Bands need to be sending information about their upcoming shows to the music writers 1.5 weeks in advance of the show (minimum)
Bands need to send: The cost of the show, the bands on the bill, the time and venue of the show
Bands expressed a lack of knowledge on who their local music writers actually are (I have a two-part post for tomorrow and Wednesday opening this up for musicians)

With the ebook in hand bands were ready to start booking themselves live shows in and around Houston. We will be following up with each and every band to make sure that they actually work towards this and not sink into a hole of apathy. By discussing how these bands are using the ebook and leveraging community-based support every band in the Houston Music Community can begin to practice these career building steps.

More information about the next Bandcampus: SXSW PREP coming this week.

Check out some other press on this round of Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY

Booking Your Band in Texas Guide – Day 5, Victoria/Corpus Christi Area

matthew — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:00:11 +0000

Welcome to the final day of pre-release of the ebook ‘Booking Your Band in Texas’. The compiled ebook will be available for free download on Monday, February 1st, 2010. This guide is designed to help you contact and book yourself a live show at venues around Texas. Today’s venue list covers areas near Victoria and Corpus Christi, close to the gulf and within an approximate 4 hour drive of Houston.

Booking Your Band in Texas – pt. 5, Victoria / Corpus Christi

This download includes a list of venues located in and around Victoria/Corpus Christi as well as the below graph which can help you to understand the musical landscape of a particular city. The area surrounding Victoria and Corpus Christi supports standard genres rather than offshoots. Unlike other cities, Country/Cowboy/Western are by far the most popular genre in the area. Rock/Pop are actually second, however, they still manage to make up 25% of the venue landscape. Artists in R &B/Hip Hop and Rap will have a difficult time booking themselves in this area as no venue identifies themselves as catering to this genre. Similarly, there are no venues which claim to support the genres of Dance/Electronic, Experimental, Metal, Ambient/New Age, Eclectic, or any other Latin genre save Tejano. Punk is not mentioned but Rockabilly makes up 5% of the genre representations so any punk band with enough crossover could find themselves a gig.

‘Booking Your Band in Texas’ Release Schedule
Every day of this week, a new venue listing will be released for Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Victoria/Corpus Christi. If you come to Bandcampus:BOOKING PARTY on Sunday, January 31st you’ll receive the full ebook, 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.

The Free ebook
On Monday, 2/1/10, the full version of the guide 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.

Booking Your Band in Texas Guide – Day 4, San Antonio

matthew — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:00:38 +0000

Welcome to Day 4 of the release of the ebook ‘Booking Your Band in Texas’. This guide is designed to help you contact and book yourself a live show at venues around Texas. Today’s venue list covers San Antonio, known by the public for their Riverwalk and by bands as having a large number of Metal bands.

Booking Your Band in Texas – pt. 4, San Antonio

This download includes a list of venues located in and around San Antonio as well as the below graph which can help you to understand the musical landscape of a particular city. San Antonio, like all other previously surveyed cities, has a greater percentage of venues focused on rock/pop than any other genre. Also similar to Dallas and Austin, the genres of Country/Cowboy/Western are the second most popular genre for venues to support. Several venues in San Antonio list themselves catering to the genres of “Honky Tonk” and “Southern Rock.” R&B/Rap/Hip Hop is minimized in San Antonio as compared to Houston but Latin Pop and other similar genres are the third most popular genre in San Antonio. Metal represents around 3% of the genres when lumped with Gothic and Industrial, two genres not charting at all in any other surveyed cities in Texas.

The Free ebook
On Monday, 2/1/10, the full version of the guide 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

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.

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

Booking Your Band in Texas Guide – Day 3, Houston

matthew — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:08:56 +0000

Welcome to Day 3 of the release of the ebook ‘Booking Your Band in Texas’. This guide is designed to help you contact and book yourself a live show at venues around Texas. Today’s venue list covers Houston, the fourth largest city in the nation but a city not known for it’s music community.

Booking Your Band in Texas – pt. 3, Houston

This download includes a list of venues located in and around Houston as well as the below graph which can help you to understand the musical landscape of a particular city. Houston, similar to Dallas and Austin is largely represented by the genres of rock/p0p and all other derivatives. Unlike any of the other cities surveyed up to this point though, Rap/Hip Hop and R&B plays a greater role in the musical economy, second after rock/pop. As we have seen with Dallas and Austin the genres of country, jazz, blues and acoustic/folk/singer/songwriter fill in the remaining top slots. One interesting note about Houston though is that there is no clear minority as the lesser represented genres all seem to be nearly equally represented in the listed venues, even including Metal and Top 40.

The Free ebook
On Monday, 2/1/10, the full version of the guide 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

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.

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

Booking Your Band in Texas Guide – 5 Days of Career Building Information for Bands

matthew — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:56:17 +0000

Any band looking to step up their game in 2010 can initiate their excitement engines. Over the next 5 days I’ll be releasing a list of venues within a four hour drive of Houston that you can contact to book your band a gig. This list is a lead up to Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY which will be held on January 31st where you can meet with other like-minded bands to book yourself gigs.

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

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.

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

Join the Houston Arts Community at ArtCamp

matthew — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:17:33 +0000

In October of 2008 Caroline Collective hosted the first Bandcamp. The event was a full afternoon of education and community discussion surrounding the challenges and successes of the local music community. Through a several hour townhall discussion, community members were able to voice their concerns, ideas and success stories in the Houston Music Community. Fast forward several months and Bandcamp is a regular monthly event addressing the facets of career development that bands need to be successful as well as providing continued resources for local artists.

As a community based education model, Bandcamp has been a resounding success. Sessions are led by experts in the particular topic but the open discussion format results in information sharing about some of the best practices and experiences other artists have learned from. Bandcamp organizers have also recently begun to offer one-on-one consultation sessions with bands looking for extra guidance. Regular attendees have reported that Bandcamp has resulted in more gigs, better online presence and a new and richer relationships with members of the Houston Music Community.

Bandcamp’s success is a demonstration of the power of community based education models and what can result from open forums for discussion and idea sharing that ultimately create opportunities for individuals and groups to be more successful. The best part about these models is that they can work for any genre or specialization. For that reason we’ve decided to hold a similar event but this time focused on the Houston Arts Community.

Join us this Saturday, February 28th for ArtCamp. Artcamp is an informal, community-based event to discuss the state of the arts in Houston and develop an informed strategy on how we can collectively support our arts community. The format is open and decided upon by those in attendance but we have several goals that we will achieve through open discussion and peer-to-peer educational sessions:

Inform participants of available resources online and offline
Share best practices among organizations, including audience development, fundraising, board and volunteer recruitment, and online outreach
Share best practices among artists, such as developing their careers, promoting themselves and their work, obtaining gallery representation, and building an online presence

The schedule for the day will include educational sessions and a townhall discussion section just like at Bandcamp. Through this discussion we hope to determine the difficulties that local artists and members of the art community experience, the common solutions to problems, and voice concerns, comments and suggestions for improvement. The final session of the day will be a focused townhall discussion proposing sustainable solutions to educate and deliver resources to members of the community to ensure the improved success and continued communication at all levels.

Check out this great quote about ArtCamp from co-organizer Grace Rodriguez of AYN Brand:

The trigger for this event was Wayne Dolcefino’s scathing editorial (disguised as an investigative report) that derided funding for the arts in Houston. Members and supporters of our arts community were appalled at the lack of factual context and objectivity in his broadcast; and were disappointed that private objection to Dolcefino’s “reports” were not reflected in a unified voice, publicly. Several of us recognized that we need to facilitate better communication and improve relationships among the various arts organizations, stakeholders, and supporters to strengthen our community, so that we could disseminate information and correct misunderstandings more quickly in the future.

We hope to bring the general public and arts supporters together with those directly involved in the arts community to discuss the state of the arts in Houston, share best practices, and develop strategies on how we can *collectively* support and contribute to our arts community. Basically, we want everyone who “hearts” art to get to know each other and figure out how we can best vitalize and support our cultural community.

The signup and event listing is here: http://barcamp.org/ArtCampHouston

For more information, please contact Matthew Wettergreen at mwettergreen@gmail.com or Grace Rodriguez at grace@aynbrand.com.

Bandcamp: ONLINE PRESENCE

matthew — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:31:23 +0000

Your website is one of the most important tools you have as an artist. It’s a place for people to discover and listen to your music, contact you, purchase your merchandise and more. Your website acts as a promoter, publicist and dj and it does all this 24/7 for anyone in the world.

In addition to the positive benefits of a website, having a home base on the web is one of the basic building blocks for becoming a successful band. As a musician it is essential to have a home base that ties in the heavily used online communities like facebook and myspace and musician specific community based sites such as virb and imeem. Still, there are a large number of bands that utilize only myspace, thinking that it is both sufficient to act as a promotional machine and that they have (in very little time) cemented their online presence. By employing only Myspace they are rendering themselves mostly invisible to the greater web audience and doing themselves a great disservice.

One of the barriers to actually setting up a website seems to be the lack of knowledge surrounding how to accomplish this. Also, bands seem to think that getting a website is something that is difficult or more time consuming than regular utilization of Myspace or other community based tools. Getting your own website set up can be done simply, beautifully and free, depending on what you’re looking for.

February’s Bandcamp will teach effective strategies for maintaining an online presence that utilizes a full complement of websites and techniques. I will be leading this session and will demonstrate a number of available sites for musician and discuss strategic planning based on goals and time commitment.

Bring your laptop.

If you can’t attend the session on 2/1, don’t fret. There will be an ENCORE session of this month’s Bandcamp at the end of the month on 2/22. You could event come twice to pick up a new perspective and plan for your online presence.

Things that you will learn at February’s BandCamp
-   Improved tools beyond Myspace for online presence
-   the Wheel and spoke concept of web presence including a home base and digital outposts
-   designing a strategy for employing these digital outposts and selecting the ones that work for your band
-   Learn how to set up your own website in 15 minutes
-   Learn how to measure metrics for your site to determine your audience and what content is the most interesting to your visitors
-   An overview of other digital outposts other than Myspace that are just as effective for artist promotion
-   How to integrate your digital outposts to your website
-   Free email accounts for your band
-   Places to seed your music, video
-   Where to sell online: amazon, itunes, cdbaby, napster
-   Locations to post your photos online (flickr, photobucket, etc.)
-   Ideas for driving traffic to your site

WHAT: Bandcamp ONLINE PRESENCE

WHEN: 2/1/09 1-3pm AND 2/22/09 1-3pm

WHERE: Caroline Collective, 4820 Caroline Houston TX