How to get gigs

Ring up your local authority and ask for their list of venues with an entertainment licence. (After 2005, ask again, because the rules may change.)

You’ll need a band fund for marketing.  It costs money up front and it is a risk.  If you set aside a fund of around 35% of the total band income for marketing costs, - promotion, telephone, mailing, advertising that’s about right.  “Oh, we can do it for much less,” I hear you say. Yes, and two years later you’ll have put in a huge amount of work, done a few gigs for poor money. The band will break up.

Remember that the best way to get gigs is by word of mouth – use your band members for contacts, build up a local following and do some publicity for each gig, play good music and your reputation in your area will grow.  Keep in touch with your contacts regularly. It will take at least three years for the gigs to start to come to you, meanwhile you’ll have to hustle for them.

If you want to play free practise gigs with a live audience then ask your local authority for their list of Residential Homes for the Elderly, plus Day Care Centres. Ring them up and ask if they would like to have your band play for them for free.  They’ll love it and you’ll get a nice appreciative audience, and do some good for them. The only trouble is that may only be able to take you during the day.

Pubs will pay you a pittance, but you may as well go for them – they might want you regularly every last Friday.  You can try hotels in the same way, but your band of amateurs may get fed up with doing the same old thing.  Have your band price ready when you talk and first check with others, what they have been paid.

You’ll get some clubs and hotels which may not want to pay you at all but they’ll offer you a share of the receipts at the door.  They always offer this if life has taught them that putting on jazz does not pay.  So you won’t get much money either.  You can negotiate to take all of the door receipts, or they pay you a small flat fee for expenses then a share of the door but it always adds up to the same thing – you won’t get much, but maybe you don’t care. You’ll need to promote the gig.

Find all the local venues (from word of mouth and from the web) which play jazz regularly or have jam sessions, go along, make friends and contacts, sit in, and you’ll get gigs.  You may not be playing the music you love, you are hustling, but that’s what it takes. When you are ready and the band is good, then take space in the Yellow Pages under Entertainments, and always use the listings in the local paper.  

Direct mailing venues is expensive – allow a cost of at least £350 per thousand, including leaflet, letter, mailing list, stamps, stationary. It also produces notoriously poor results – around a 2% response rate and only half of them will book.  So if you spend £350 on mailing 1,000 venues and you get 10 gigs it has cost you £35 per gig.