I have worked as a professional musician for over 20 years. Through that time, I have traveled to many different cities, I have seen venues come and go, I have seen businesses succeed and I have seen others fail, and through it all I have accumulated quite a few good suggestions for anyone who wishes to be successful hosting live music. Whether you're a nightclub wishing to have live music on a regular basis, or an events promoter who does an event with a live band once in a while, or a swing dancer wanting to put on a big dance-centered event with one, or possibly multiple, live bands; I hope these tips will help your event become a successful one.
1. Give your potential audience an expectation, and then exceed that expectation. Give your event or venue a focus. Audiences need to know what they're getting into. If you're a jazz venue, stick to a jazz format. If you're a blues venue, stick to hiring blues bands. The most successful nightclubs with long-running histories have a built-in reputations that are more powerful than any other form of advertising. If you walk into the Blue Note or the Village Vanguard in New York City, you know exactly what type of music you will hear, no matter who the musicians are. There is a club in Denver called El Chapultepec that has had live jazz seven nights a week every night since the 1930s. The faces of the musicians come and go, the style of the music changes with the times, but everyone in the city knows that if they want to hear good jazz music any night of the week, they can walk into the 'Pec and they won't be disappointed. The same goes for the Candlelight, a blues club in Portland, OR. Blues fans no that no matter what night of the week, they can go to the Candlelight and hear some great live blues music. The club doesn't need to tell people that they are a blues club; that's understood because they have never deviated from that format through all of their years.
This principle also applies to event organizers, not just nightclubs. I have played music for swing dancers for the past 14 or 15 years and have seen those events succeed or fail too. The most successful events are the ones that have a "theme". Something that gives audiences an idea of what they're buying a ticket to. This can be as simple as a catchy, descriptive name, or it can be an entire marketing plan, but it needs to be something that clearly conveys to your potential audience exactly what they should expect at your event. This is called Branding, and it is important if you want people to attend your event.
Please note that your Theme doesn't necessarily need to limit the style of music you present to your audiences. Having a singular style of music definitely makes it easier for your customers to define their Expectations, but it is by no means the only way to do so. Your theme could be "French Restaurant with classy acoustic background music". Or it could be "we serve the finest local wines, and look we have Live Music too." The only rule is, if you're planning on presenting Live Music at your event or venue, give your audience an idea of what to expect and why it's important that they spend their money at your venue or event.
2. Reach the widest audience possible - This is the number one secret to success in any business, and the number one preventable cause of failure. The Live Music business is no exception. Unless your Theme (see above) is "we're so hip we don't want anyone to know about us" in which case your business should expect to lose money for at least a year or two while the word-of-mouth does its work, (which is doubly ironic since the shelf-life of a "too-hip-to-advertise" business is only a couple of years until the hipsters decide that their hangout has become "too mainstream" and move on) the Bottom Line is you should always plan on reaching the widest possible audience. You might have an idea of what kind of clientele is your "target audience". By all means court them, cater to their every whim, but don't exclude the rest of the world in the process. You yourself might not care about little details like atmosphere, wall decor, or the quality of the wood in the dance floor, but as crazy as it sounds, there are potential paying customers who do care about those things, and it could mean the difference between having a few people walk through your door who share exactly the same interests with you, or having a lot of people walk through your door who share enough similarities to be interested.
This is all about atmosphere. 10% of your potential clientele might be interested in exactly the same reasons for being there that you are. But in order to achieve "critical mass" you need to give 100% of your potential clientele a reason for wanting to cross your threshold. Some of them might be there for the drinks. Others might be there for the food. Some might choose your venue because of your fine selection of microbrews. Others might enjoy the fact that you have a dance floor. There might even be some who like the color scheme of the artwork on your walls. Whatever the reason, it is vitally important to understand that different people have different reasons for going out on the town. The more of these reasons you can successfully accommodate, the more people will have an incentive to choose your venue in which to spend their money.
One example of a business failing because of this: I once worked as a musician in the house band at a jazz club in a ski town in Colorado. The owner's vision was to provide a "touch of class" in the midst of all the skier bars and pub hangouts where the smell of days-old beer and cigarette ashes permeated the bare floors of all of those other places. So he invested in a sound system, built a stage, covered his entire floors with carpet, and emphasized an upscale atmosphere with good food and classy jazz music instead of the typical bar-band fare. A nice concept, which could've worked well. He even made his venue non-smoking, which, in 1994 was still unheard-of for a bar. But he overdid it. He stocked his bar with top-shelf scotch and decided to charge at least $1 more per-drink for his Well drinks than any other bar within walking distance. (note: in a ski resort town, there are Many bars within walking distance!) His rationale was that this would limit his clientele to only those with plenty of money to spend. Venue owners call this a "riff-raff filter" and yes that's a real term in the industry. So what happened? Customers would go get liquored up down the street and then come in and listen to the high-quality music for free. Due to the density of bars featuring Live Music within walking distance, no bar was willing to be the first to charge a cover, so the only way any of them could make any money was from food/beverage sales; the other bars were all doing fine but he was losing money every night even though his room was packed with people. The riff-raff filter didn't keep out the riff-raff, it just kept them from spending any money in his establishment. Meanwhile, his bar was so crowded with non-paying customers, that the people who did want to buy drinks from him had to wait 45 minutes to get served by one overworked waitress. The lesson to be learned from this: this owner could have easily turned his business around by offering a low-cost, competitively priced alternative to his top-shelf fare. His top-shelf clientele would still show up; he had done everything else right; atmosphere, music, food, sound system -- but his one crucial mistake was not having at least a few affordable menu/drink items for the casual bar crowd that made up 90% of his potential customer base. Instead, he chose to blame the band for costing him too much in overhead. He fired the band, cancelled his Live Music to save money (thus eliminating the one remaining reason why customers should patronize his establishment at all) and his doors were permanently closed in less than a year.
Another example of a narrow audience base leading to a diminished role for Live Music is the Swing Dancing scene. I have been playing music for Swing Dancers since the early days of the "revival" in 1997. Before that, I was playing in a Big Band in a small club on Wednesday nights. The guys in the band, all professional musicians with established careers, saw these Wednesdays as our "bowling league nights". You know, a chance for 18 guys to hang out and drink beer and have fun making music together for $20 bucks per man. Our audience consisted of about 30 dedicated fans who showed up regularly once a week to dance to our music and drink wine. Then, suddenly, in about 1997, we saw our audience explode to 200 young people trying to cram into that tiny space. We eventually moved to a larger space, a former Masonic temple that had been repurposed with a brand new, pristine dance floor -- and not much else. No bar, no food, no atmosphere, and no fun. Our original fans, most of whom liked to enjoy a few glasses of wine or beer throughout the night, stopped going to these dances where no alcohol was served. The new crowd of Lindy Hoppers stopped going too, because they discovered there was a different swing band with a weekly gig at an actual bar, their dance floor was slightly smaller but still big enough to accommodate hundreds of dancers. Inexplicably (since the majority of swing dancers don't drink) the presence of alcohol and an actual "bar atmosphere" seems to be more inviting than a multipurpose building with a great dance floor but no atmosphere.
I use the word 'inexplicably' because the majority of swing dancers will tell you they don't drink and that they don't care if there's no alcohol, no food, etc -- but obviously someone does care, and here is the truth of the situation: a successful Live Music event needs some diversity. DJ'd dance events on the other hand do not. A Swing Dance Event with a top-notch DJ and top-notch instructors will attract people who are interested in dancing, but a Live Music event necessarily needs to attract listeners as well as dancers in order to be viable. Even back then, this was true. The most successful "dance" events took place at bars and established businesses where people could dance if they wanted to, or they could sit and be a bystander and feel like they were part of the "scene" even if they weren't participating. The past few years have seen too many Swing Dance events organized by people who don't put much thought into anything but the bare essentials: the dance floor, the band, the DJ, the instructors, etc... Don't get me wrong, these are all important!! But they are not the only things that are important. Lots of people, especially those who are listeners or who are casual sometimes-dancers like to sit and have a drink, socialize, and watch once in a while. If you want your event to be successful, give those people some kind of reason to be there, too.
There is a certain amount of attrition to the Swing Dance scene (dancers grow up and start families & don't go out all the time anymore) and there is hardly any new blood coming in. The dancers' solution to this, unfortunately, has been to hire fewer live bands, to rely more on DJs playing recorded music for their events. For one thing, it's cheaper; and for another, if people only care about the dancing, the floor, the instructors, etc at their event, then Live Music is less of a priority and is often the first thing to get cut when budgets are an issue. Swing organizers will often pay huge amounts of money for big Name instructors to teach their dance lessons, but they balk at paying for a live band or paying to have their event in a decorated room with food and/or drinks for the non-dancers. As a result, the only people who show up to these events anymore are those who are so completely obsessed with dancing that nothing else matters. And how does one become so completely obsessed with dancing in the first place? Every one of these dancers started out as a non-dancer first; they came to the venue or event for some other reason (such as to hear the band) and they decided the dancing looked like a lot of fun. That's not going to happen if you don't give them a reason to show up in the first place.
If you want to organize a successful Swing Dancing event, or an ongoing successful Swing Dancing community, the secret is to grow your community; reach out to non-dancers and give them a reason to keep coming back. Appeal to the widest audience possible. And I'm not talking about just offering a free lesson ahead of the band's performance. Most people will not take the lesson their first few times, they just want to watch, soak up the scene, determine whether they want to join in. People are inherently shy, they need to feel comfortable. It's a lot easier to make people feel comfortable if they have some semblance of ambience they're used to. A bar, a restaurant, a candlelit table, things people associate with "going out on the town". Most people do not associate a gymnasium or multipurpose building with "going out on the town" so if you want to appeal to a wider audience than just established swing dancers, (and you should want to appeal to a wider audience than just established swing dancers) you need to create an atmosphere that gives people a lot of reasons to want to be there, not just the dancing.
3. Location, location, location - this is another most important secret to success. If you're operating a bar where your primary income is from liquor sales, you want to be located in a part of the city where people don't have to do a whole lot of driving when they leave your establishment. Access to public transportation and/or taxi service is important, and will increase your liquor sales and overall patronage. If you're operating a Live Music venue, you want to be accessible and easy to find, with plenty of parking and conveniently located to other eating and drinking establishments. When people are going "out on the town" or to "dinner and a show", they're typically going to start at a restaurant, then go to your Live Music venue, then possibly finish up at a bar if the date is going really well. If all of those establishments are within walking distance of each other, that increases the likelihood that your venue will be on their itinerary. If they have to park their car more than once, it's not as likely - especially if there's alcohol involved. The most successful Live Music venues are the ones that are easy to find. Having a prominently displayed marquee advertising your place of business definitely helps, but even more simply than that, picture yourself as someone giving a newcomer directions to your establishment. The more complicated the directions are, the less likely they'll be to find it. A simple cross-street directive works best, such as "12th and Hawthorne on the East Side", or "NW 10th and Everett" - but if you have to tell someone "it's at that weird triangle-shaped intersection where the 205 and the 26 come together at the bottom of the hill below the medical school" your potential audience is going to be lost before they even start looking for your place. Also: the Suburbs are automatically a bad location for a Live Music venue, don't even try.
4. Promote it like it's the Second Coming. Seriously. Your target audience should feel like their lives will be over if they miss this event. They should have no excuse to miss it. "I didn't hear about it because I never saw it advertised anywhere" are words that should never be uttered by anyone in your target audience. Which brings up another point: Never expect the band to do your promoting for you. Musicians are very good at entertaining people but as a general rule we aren't promoters. We always do everything we can, including mailing lists, emails, and Facebook/Myspace/Twitter feeds, but your event needs the benefit of a real P/R professional to really do it right.
5. Get your reputation honestly. Face it, the first few weeks any new club is open, they'll still be ironing the bugs out. Some customers will have to wait too long for their food, others might have trouble finding parking, who knows what or why but there are bound to be people who have a bad experience during the first few months of a venue's existence. And unfortunately, those people are likely to complain to their friends, because it's human nature. This is normal, and it's why the rule of thumb in the nightclub business is to have enough capital to be able to operate at a loss for a full year before things turn around. The people who wrote that rule knew this fact: first impressions happen immediately, but lasting reputations are built over time. Keep your focus and don't lose your mojo; the number of people who have good experiences at your venue over time will overcome the few who had a bad experience early on. If your menu is tasty and your music is worth the money people are paying in cover charges, people will eventually catch on. (on the other hand, if the bad reputation is well-deserved, good luck trying to shake that, because people will complain, especially if they keep having a reason to.)
Note that this is not an end-all-be-all of how to run a nightclub or live music venue. I sure wouldn't want to do it. My hat's off to the people who do - it's a tough business but we all appreciate the fact that there are still live music venues out there. Hopefully some of them will take this advice to heart and stay in business...
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