Entertainers University Course- Making a Living With Music-Lesson 4

Transcript Of This Video
(00:06):
Now we’re going to talk about where some of the gigs are that you can depend upon. We’re gonna start with the most basic gigs and probably the ones that you’ve played the most as a solo musician or with a band. If you were like me and had a background growing up, playing with bands until around 2000 and Raleigh, I started doing solo work around 2005, I guess, and I, no, I take that back. I had done it before working with Midi Track Music in the eighties. The, but then I did the whole band thing till the early two thousands, and I transitioned away from the band and started doing solo exclusively with track music. But it, most musicians, most entertainers, their total experience with playing gigs is playing in clubs, the private parties and things. That’s the creme de la creme for them. That’s the, uh, cherry on the top of the, the ice cream.
(01:03):
If they can get private gigs, that’s what they all strive for. But let’s talk about playing in clubs and playing in restaurants. Now, as I’ve spoken already in this course, you’re building an entertainment provider company, and the way you’re going to build any company is by having consistency in your customers. Statistics show that it’s something like four or five times as expensive and difficult to get a new customer as it is to keep an existing customer. So that’s the philosophy I want you to get in your mind about playing at restaurants and clubs. You want to have a handful of them, and you want to, if you can develop residency gigs with each one of them, rather than hopping from club A on the first Friday night of the month to club B on the second Friday night to club C on the third and club D on the fourth, and then maybe come back to club a the next month.
(02:10):
You never build a consistent fan base unless you can have residency gigs set up quite simply because your fans, the customers are never going to know where to find you or how to find you. They’re not going to keep up with your calendar. They’re not going to go online and look for where you’re playing. Oh, let’s go see where Rock and Rick is tonight. No, it has to, and I’ve done this many years. This comes from experience. I owned a club, a very successful club, rock and Rick’s guitar bar, and it was off the chain as they say it was. In fact, it was so successful that I didn’t even want to do it anymore. I did it a couple of years and it was driving me crazy, the liability of it. It was so, there were so many people in there partying so hard every night that I couldn’t really control it.
(03:01):
And really all I wanted to do was play. That club thing fell in my lap because I was so successful as a performer. That big money people came to me and gave me the club, gave it to me to be rocking Rick’s guitar bar, and all they wanted was a percentage of it. So I know exactly how this works, and I know what clubs can afford to pay because I owned the club and I was the only entertainment ever at Rock and Rick’s guitar bar. There were many other bands and solo performers, good friends of mine who literally begged me to let them play there because of the crowd size. Every night, every night it was packed. Every night there was a line out the door to get in solo, me doing my solo thing with the guitar and the track music, with the blended DJ music.
(03:52):
That’s the key to it all. And I mean, I, I’ll show you the pictures of the club. It, it was insane. It was off the hook, but it was so successful that I just cashed it in after a couple of years, went back to just playing gigs. And really, when it was all said and done, I make just as much money just playing gigs as I did, owning that very successful club with a la hot, less headaches and hassles. But when it comes to restaurants and clubs, there are two different things. A club is, um, a, an establishment that makes its primary income selling alcohol. It’s going to tend to be later hours, and it’s going to tend to be, um, less of a family oriented place. It’s gonna be wilder to to, just to sum it up, A restaurant on the other hand, is a family oriented type show.
(04:45):
And restaurants are all as long as they sell alcohol. And I don’t know that I’ve played a restaurant that doesn’t sell alcohol. I’m in Texas and every restaurant that’s successful sells, you know, beer or wine. Some of them sell the mixed drink, but those are all different licenses that you have to get. But a restaurant, um, is a very solid good residency gig for you to get because they’re wanting to build a clientele. A restaurant has a certain menu that doesn’t change every week. It’s the same menu. And you can share this with them because I’ve shared this with many restaurant owners to get them to understand this concept. If they change out the entertainment every week, every Saturday night, every Friday night, every Thursday night, whatever, they’re gonna have a different performer. They will never build consistency in their entertainment. Just like if they changed their menu every week, the customers would never know what to expect each time they came.
(05:56):
That’s why it’s so important to have consistency, not only in your menu, but also in the entertainment. That’s why comedy piano bars have been around for decades and they’re packed every night, weeknights all through the weekends. You have to get reservations to even get in them. It’s the same players, the same songs. They’re playing brown-eyed girl in Margaritaville, uh, don’t stop believing. How is that, how can they do the same thing but yet keep drawing people just like a good restaurant cooks the same dishes over and over, but continually draws people. That’s a concept. I want you to really, let’s sink in because it’s very important. So restaurants are a great source of residency gigs. Clubs are also, they’re a little bit different because again, they’re later hours and it’s a kind of a different dynamic. It’s the same thing. They’re looking for entertainment. They need entertainment, drinking establishments, restaurants, clubs need you.
(06:57):
They need entertainment to draw people and hold them. And that’s what you learn in the Entertainer’s University. Specifically what to do, how to set up your show, to pace it, to pick the right song selection at the right time. How to build a very successful residency like I’ve done for many years. Some of these residencies I’ve had for 10 years, same thing. I’m, I’m doing the same stuff, but it, it changes based on the crowd that’s that’s there because I’m able to do that because of the flexibility with the gig coach method of having a blended show live music slash dj. Some nights I do, you know, 80, 90% live singing. Some nights I might only do 50% live singing and the rest of it I just dj. If there’s a younger crowd there and they’re wanting some hip hop or whatever, that’s the beauty of having the blended show.
(07:53):
So that’s restaurants and clubs, kind of the psychology. Again, it’s too deep to get into the specifics of how to do it, how to approach them, how to email them, what to say on the phone call when you initially contact them to tell ’em about your services, what to say, what kind of promo do you need to send and not send. That’s all in the entertainers university, and if you join that, you’ll have access to it on an ongoing basis. So the first thing is clubs and restaurants. Next thing we’re going to talk about is playing parties, private parties.
Duration
8 minutes 30 seconds