How To Book The Venue Of Your Dreams

Imagine playing on stage with your band and you look out into the crowd, and there’s literally no end in sight. A whole stadium filled with fans looking to you because they feel a connection with the music you’ve made, and you personally. People screaming “I love you more than tiramisu!!”; no longer are the days where those people are screaming “Freebird!!”. Ahh. What a time.

While this situation may seem distant, it’s not at all impossible. Times may be changing where people may just want to stay home and livestream the concert, but events like this still happen. The reason why most people aren’t getting here is because they’re shooting too high too quickly; you have to walk before you can run. This article will discuss what venues you should be shooting for in order to transition into better ones.

Photo by Antoine Julien on Unsplash

The Reasoning

The reason you can’t make it into those large venues is simple; you aren’t ready yet.

You may think you’re ready, but reality just isn’t agreeing with you. The key to getting closer to these venues is finding out why reality isn’t letting you into these high end venues.

This may take a selfless look into yourself; maybe your skills just aren’t there yet. Well, now you can focus on improving your skills!

Maybe your marketing/following just isn’t there yet. Maybe you need to spend some time learning how to connect with an audience and growing one.

Maybe you just don’t have the track record yet; well, build that portfolio!

If there’s multiple things you need to work on, just focus on the one that will give you the most improvement/results. Once it’s no longer your weakest link, find the next weakest and build that! Sooner or later you’ll have a strong chain linked fence you can use to climb up.

If you really were ready, you would be booking these shows already, and there’s no excuses stopping you from doing so.

My intention is most definitely NOT to discourage you, but to help you find what's really holding you back! Once you can find what's holding you back, that's half the battle and you're already halfway there! You can do it!!

Here’s a bunch of questions to ask to know if you are ready/a good fit for a particular venue:

• Does the venue support your target audience?

• Is the venue the right size for your current audience?

• Do they serve your audience well?

I’m not sure if your choice of venue matters so much as what venue supports your audience the best.

What Venue Supports Your Audience The Best?

Believe it or not, a 10,000 capacity stadium might not be the best fit for someone who has a facebook following of 2.3k people. What venue supports your audience size the best?

Start small and sell out your venues until you can comfortably make the jump to a higher capacity venue; this creates a demand to see you, almost like you have to be a VIP in order to be able to hear your music because the show is already sold out! It inherently creates value to come see you, only a special small amount of people can come and see your performance!

Once you’re consistently selling these venues out, it’s time to start looking at slightly bigger venues.

Does the venue support your target audience well? Since you’re basically hosting them, it’s important to choose venues that represent you well too. That means matching the venue with your target audience.

If you’re a death metal band, maybe playing at an upbeat, clean place isn’t the ideal place to play; grungy bars might be more suitable for your fans that match the mood of the music you play.

How is the sound? Does your audience expect high quality sound with a great sound engineer? The sound guy does have a role in how people perceive your band, so make sure you aren’t letting them down or overselling them when you can’t consistently give them that level of quality.

Eventually you may want to hire a touring live sound engineer to help out with making you sound your best on the road, which can bring a level of consistency when playing live.

Matching The Venue With Your Audience

Once you figure these questions out, you can match your venue with your audience. Once you do that, you can focus on growing your audience, which in turn will help you get better venues!

It’s a slow process; you can’t do this thing overnight. Everything is connected, and it all comes down to your audience and how you grow it. Booking the wrong venue can actually work against you in some cases; you don’t want to book a venue that you can only fill 15% of the space, as it will make it seem like you aren’t very appealing. You also don’t want to pick places that won’t serve your audience well.

If you do the right things, at the right times, enough times, you’ll see growth. Eventually, if you stick with it, you may even book the venue you dreamed about from the beginning :)

Best of luck!

-Michael