How to Book Shows/Gigs

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ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
Part of becoming a successful artist is booking shows and gigs for yourself and your band. When artists are financially able to, they hire a booking agent. But what about the tightly budgeted independent artists? In this video, Seth Mosley, Grammy Award Winning Producer and Owner of Full Circle Music, gives his recommendation and how he booked shows when he was with his band Me In Motion.

This episode is part of a podcast SERIES called on YouTube called “100 Music Industry Questions Answered.” You can watch the rest of this series in our playlist here:

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ABOUT FULL CIRCLE MUSIC:
Full Circle Music is a Music Production Company, Music Publishing Company, Record Label, and Music Education Academy based in Nashville, TN. They regularly work with some of the biggest names in music, such as Newsboys, High Valley, Casting Crowns, Skillet, Francesca Battisteli, and For King & Country, just to name a few. Their team has several Grammy Awards, Dove Awards, and over 20 #1 songs at radio. Through the Full Circle Music Academy, Full Circle Music aspires to teach the next generation of musicians what it takes to make it in the modern music industry.

#Songwriter #MusicIndustry #HowTo

[Superblood]

GOOD CHRIST! This is the video. If you’re combing through random videos for advice, THIS is the one. All the other ones are common sense. You gave me two tips that literally made me pause the video to try and they WORKED. That has never ever happened to me in the history of YouTube tutorials. Tysm dude I have another show thanks to you, not even joking ❤️

[theallduck]

Im starting an orchestra trio with 2 of my friends hopefully this goes somewhere wish me luck 🤞🏽🤞🏽

[JohnnyGuestMusic]

I’d love to hear more detail about booking in today’s market.

[catladycabaret]

Less than a minute in and I can tell you're for real here. Booking is hard work, thanks for the sage advice.

[jachinharder]

I remember your band, Me in Motion. You opened for Decyfer Down and Red, it was a great show.

[codersince]

I am in East Texas and am rebranding myself and starting over after a break from performing for 10 years. So I am basically a new artist but I do solo guitar work in differing styles.

[madcracker]

Our band finally gave up having the door slammed in our face and hired a booking agent. Best thing we did, we stay busy every week and are forced to turn down gigs. Well worth the small fee given our gigs increased 100% as did our pay per gig.

[kendraborczuch-kitts]

Hey, I’m so happy you did this video:) Could you possibly do a video on the venue end of that? How to approach an artist or band, what questions to ask, define language to use, explain that process? Thanks ☺️

[StephanieDass]

This was definitely helpful! Thank you so much :) I've definitely done the whole email thing and DM thing, but never thought of actually CALLING! I thought that would be annoying to them, but really, you're right treat it like a telemarketer and it is a numbers game.

Well, I definitely have some homework to do! 😅 Let's see if you're right and see how long I last at doing these calls! 😂 I hope for my sake you are wrong. I'm actually excited to do this! Thank you again :)

[AlbertoGomez-oiou]

thanks for the advice, when I arrived to this country I didn't have anything to eat, I needed a job first so I remember I had no phone, so I walked every morning around 40 min to the closest public phone and I had to detour in the laundry to illegaly change some quarters, so the night before I always made a bucket potential list of places to call, so I connected myself to the next street free neighbor's wifi lifting my old/slow dammaged laptop to get some internet and find places, but at that time I didn't thought about being "famous" it was just a place to make some cash, but today it is easier to use technology to always talk one-on-one :), you get used to the "NOs" so don't take it personally and look for the YES

[joecrites]

Question...so once you make your phone calls and get your show booked how do you deal with the financial side of the deal ? Do you ask for money? Do you offer to play for free? Do you at least try to cover your travel expenses? If so, how? What’s a professional way of talking about the money ?

[nanimonada]

I am currently walking in to my local dive bars and asking them what we need to do olay there. After 30 venues, we got 1 show. My band was stoked!

[anthonymontoya]

Great advice man! I'm from Texas and was wondering, what kind of Venues would I shoot for a Vocal/choral group with a backing band?

[BookedAndBlessedWithHollie]

Love the idea of paying people to come to a show at the beginning but then making it back on merch (and future bookings).

[treycolton]

When booking, how do you know what price to give? That’s our biggest issue. I don’t want to short sell ourselves but I don’t want to overcharge.

[unknownbrother]

Thank you for this video. I'm just unsure of what places I even want to play at.

[suicideveterans]

Thank you ! This video was indeed helpful . Young Maui artist tryna get serious about doing shows . It’s fun to do one offs but I want more consistency. Just watched this while I’m tryna edit a music promo :)

[joecrites]

Thank you for this video...very helpful.

[rylesriri]

When do you know you can hire a venue and do your own show from just doing gigs run by promoters and do you need to do your own shows to potentially get noticed by a record labels. Is it possible for promoters to be looking for a headlining act so you don’t need to book your own show?

[kennymac]

Who do you ask for when calling a venue?