Give People A Reason To Show Up

Tired of people not showing up to your shows? It can be very disheartening to put in extreme amounts of work towards a show, only to have an empty audience. It can be easy to blame others for what seems like their laziness as a reason to skip out on your meticulously crafted performance; but is it really their fault? Maybe a portion of it is, but in order to improve, you have to look at what you can do to keep people coming back looking for more. This article will discuss how you can improve your chances of bringing your audience to your gig.

Photo by Braydon Anderson on Unsplash

Add Value

Adding value is a recurring theme in these posts, but for good reason. It’s what helps you grow your audience, maintain it, interact with, and monetize to keep you in business doing the thing you love.

Value is necessary for a transaction; you can’t rely on or even expect to have your audience give value to you sustainably keep you in business; it rarely ever even happens.

While you can’t expect your audience to contribute value by showing up to your gig for nothing in return, you can add value for nothing in return. The thing is, you are getting something in return; you’re trading your value for their trust, loyalty, and small chances of word of mouth marketing.

Yes, trust, loyalty, and free marketing don’t pay the bills, but it’s something. While you should never work for “exposure” instead of real money, you should be focusing on giving value to your fans because they are/should/will be what fuels your income, whether it be a portion or all of it.

Smother them in value. Make it so hard for them to ignore, they literally have to actively look the other way. If you truly give value to them consistently over time, there’s a chance they will notice this "value" imbalance whether consciously or not and feel like they need to give back to you somehow; so then you give them a chance to do so at a live show! Or you can give them another way to compensate like purchasing merch or whatever else you can offer for monetary value, which is a whole other post for this topic.

It’s kind of like fishing. Asking people to come to your show without any perceived value is like fishing without bait or a fishing pole. You ask the fish to please hop on out of the water for you without offering them any reason to! Once they see the bait/value, they’ll hop on your hook and you'll get to keep another fish.

It’s only slightly different for an audience; you can use the same bait for multiple people, except the bait is a little more difficult to catch what you're fishing for. So while it may be easier to catch many fish at once, the chances of catching each fish individually is a bit slimmer.

This is why you should keep throwing your bait out, and consistently, in order to catch the attention of your fish!

Okay. Enough with the fish 😂

How You Can Add Value

You can add value in a multitude of ways:

You can either wait for people to feel the value imbalance you created, bet on the kind hearts of people showing up without any return in value, or you can offer value solely in the event that they come to your gig. The latter is probably the most effective in this instance if your goal is to bring people to your show.

You can offer some insider information they can only get at the event. Maybe you announce a new CD in the works. Maybe you play them a sneak peak of it at the show. Simply give them some kind of information they can’t get anywhere else.

You can offer them a chance to win free merch at this show only. They get a free shirt, and you get a touch of free marketing if they choose to wear it; you’ll need to get enough people there to cover your losses of the merch expenses, but that may only be a few people if there’s a cover. In most cases it’s well worth it.

Maybe you can give value not necessarily from yourself directly, but being at a location and/or time another event is happening. If they like what’s going on next door before or after your show, the chances of them coming most definitely increases. The value is in being where they have the opportunity to get value elsewhere in addition.

The Mentality

Adopting this “value” mindset can prove very useful when it comes to business and marketing; which is really something you should take seriously if you’re looking to be a musician! You’re working for yourself and being a musician is no exception.

It can be easy to ignore the fact that giving value has anything to do with making it as a musician, because your music should be the value, right? That’s just not the case and it’s impossible to make enough high quality music for it to be the only source that keeps people interested in you.

You might think that because you spent all this time working on this set or this album, you’re entitled to some eyes and ears; it’s easy to think so because at most jobs, that’s how it is. You work and get rewarded for it. It’s different for music in the fact that you need enough people to have enough interest in the end-product itself without taking into account all of the work behind the scenes.

Now, behind the scenes content is great value! But you have to show it. People don’t know what it takes to make what you made, so you have to show them; and this is why it's interesting to them! They don't know what it takes.

So, go ahead and try it out a couple times. You might not see earth shattering results right away, but some amount of increase in engagement, or gig attendance, or interaction nonetheless :)

-Michael