Book your Season – How to easily handle artist inquiries!

An idea for House Concert Hosts and Listening Rooms

One of the challenges of booking talent is staying on top of artist inquiries. If you are open to inquiries all year long, it can create periods of frustration when you feel you don’t have time to give artists a good listen. On the other hand, closing off your booking channel (red booking light) can make you feel like you might miss out on a great opportunity.

One great solution is to book a season at a time. That can be once, twice, or up to 4 times per year, depending on how many shows you do. Here’s an example to illustrate.

Booking Quarterly Seasons – Once per quarter, we listen to all our inquiries and choose the next 2-3 shows, 6 months out or more.

• In January, we book July, August, and September shows.
• In April, we book October, November and December shows.
• etc.

Of course, you can adapt this to your preferences. Maybe you prefer to book 8+ months out. Maybe you prefer to book 4 months at a time, like this:

Booking Three Times per Year

• In January, we book September, October, November, (December optional)
• In May, we book January, February, March, April of next year.
• In September, we book May, June, July (August optional!)

Some hosts and venues like to book their entire year in one shot.

What are the benefits?

1. You can let artists know AHEAD of time that you won’t be responding until your next booking window, so you don’t have the constant pressure to answer inquiries as they come in.
2. You can compare and listen to a full menu of options, and feel great about choosing your best options for the season ahead. You can get a real sense of which artists you want to keep in touch with, say, if dates don’t line up this time.
3. You have flexibility. If your dream act reaches out for a show outside of your current booking window… book her! If there’s so much talent that you want to book an extra show, do it! List the show, and artists will see the dates/months that are no longer available.
4. Promotion becomes easier and more effective when you can promote a whole season as well as individual shows.  LRN webflyers contain links to your next 6 upcoming concerts.

Will this work for all hosts and venues? Of course not. But if a booking schedule or season appeals to you… try it!

How to adjust your profile at LRN for seasonal booking.

• Put up a yellow booking light.
• At the top of your booking info, describe your basic process in as few words as possible. “We book seasonally! In January, we will decide on our bookings for July, August and September.
• Choose the first month (July) of your booking window as your Target Month.
• Then follow your plan!

Booking seasonally? If you’d like to suspend the weekly reminders for pending inquiries, just let us know.

If enough of our hosts/venues adopt this type of plan, we can update the site to make it even easier. Thank you!

Visit http://www.ListeningRoomNetwork.com to join as a house concert host or listening room venue.

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Restaurants as Listening Rooms – have you seen it work?

Your thoughts about restaurants as listening rooms… have you seen any that work? Here’s my response to a restaurant wanting to join LRN.

Dear Paul,

Nice to hear from you. Can you tell me more about the venue? Restaurants are rarely a good fit for our network, but we have seen some exceptions.

One of the core values of our site is putting talented artists in front of a listening audience that is primarily there for the music. We emphasize a concert atmosphere and always try to avoid situations where our artists might become background music.

In most restaurants, the food is the main event, and artists are expected to play quietly so people can order, patrons and staff are constantly walking in between the artist and the audience, and many people choose to watch televisions or carry on conversations during the show. This is not a suitable environment for artists who expect an attentive audience.

Another core value is that we want artists to earn a living wage. For a touring artist, that would be a minimum of $250, and most of our venues exceed that standard. A lot of our venues also offer room and board for traveling artists.

If that makes sense to you, and feel you can meet the standards of what we call a “listening room,” then we’d be glad to support your restaurant, and connect you with our diverse and talented roster of touring artists. You can just go to Listening Room Network and join as a venue.

Fran Snyder,

founder, Listening Room Network

Next Desired Booking Month

Clear targets create more successes.

Hosts and venues at LRN have the opportunity to list their next desired booking month. The wording is tricky here, because we’re talking about the month that the show would take place, not the month that inquiries should be sent.

Some hosts might have a booking range of more than one month. Since only one month can be selected, the “target month” should be the first month of that range. You still have plenty of room for detail in the booking info window, where you can describe that you have several months available, etc.

For example, if you are booking to fill dates in March April and May, you can say exactly that in your booking info, and select “March” as your target date until that show is filled.
The target date is not meant to exclude all other possibilities, it’s simply the best and soonest target.