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.

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.

]]> http://matthewwettergreen.com/2010/01/27/booking-your-band-in-texas-guide-day-5-victoriacorpus-christi-area/feed/ 2 http://matthewwettergreen.com/2010/01/26/booking-your-band-in-texas-guide-day-4-san-antonio/ http://matthewwettergreen.com/2010/01/26/booking-your-band-in-texas-guide-day-4-san-antonio/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:00:38 +0000 matthew http://matthewwettergreen.com/?p=913

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.

‘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.

Included in today’s post are a couple example emails bands can use to initiate first contact with a venue. This form is the third step in the booking procedure as discussed at Bandcamp:BOOKING PARTY. The form is designed like a mad libs story, prompting bands to input, names, genres, adjectives, and verbs. To use the form, simply fill out the required information and contact the venue of your choice to ask for a show. Even if you don’t have a band, try it out, it’s fun!

As you can see below, I’ve filled it out for my [imaginary] band More Better. I’ve written this up to contact one of the best venues around, The Hideout, which provides a community for Chicago artists just like Caroline Collective provides a community for Houston creatives. I’ve even taken the liberty to tailor the form specifically for my band who sounds like a cross between the Boston Pops Orchestra and Big Black. Seriously, this band is awesome. Probably.

Download the mad libs style email to contact venues and book your band a show here (pdf).

For those of you who plan to use it or are using it, what changes did/would you make?