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This is podcast number one of an ongoing series on Booking and Promotion for Artists. This podcast focuses on item number one (of 12) in the Booking and Promotion Checklist: the sampler CD or DVD you'll need to book and promote yourself. We'll examine the other items and strategies in future podcasts.

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ACTUAL TEXT OF THE PODCAST:

This is the Indie Band Manager Booking and Promotion Podcast with your host Charlie Cheney on Vocalo.org. This show brings you tips and tricks to help you book better shows and promote those shows more effectively so you get bigger and better audiences for your performances. Catch all the podcasts at www.indiebandmanager.com

Hi this is Charlie Cheney and I'm starting today with a podcast series on booking and promotion. So I really want to start off with just the concept of booking and promotion, "why are we doing it?" Of course, that's a pretty simple answer in my opinion

We want to play out live, we want to sell cds, we want to get just to get out and play. And in order to play we have to contact venues or places where we can play be it any place we want to play at. The typical place is to play at a club, a coffee shop, or some type of established place, but I think there are a lot of alternatives to playing clubs, playing house concerts, at churches, playing at other types of events, sporting events, all those types of things are really important alternatives.In order to book a place to play, I think there's a set of things that we need right off the top, a booking and promotion checklist of required startup items so to speak. I think these things need to be in hard copy as well as digital, by the way

I think that everything that you create to promote yourself with, to book yourself with needs to be fully digital so you can put it on your website, put it onto MySpace, put it onto FaceBook, LastFM, it seems like there's new ones popping up every day

But all of your booking and promotion materials should be available for all of those venues. They should all be fully digital so that people can find them anywhere and see them and access them anywhere. I also want them to be in hard copy so that you can hand them out and send them out when you're actually in the process of doing active sales.

Now I think all these places like MySpace, FaceBook, Reverb Nation, the61, LastFM, and the dozens of other ones that are out there, I think these are all kind of passive, and that's great, put your information up there and let people here it and see it and decide for themselves whether they want to book you. But I think what we want to have is the hard copy version for when we start booking ourselves in a more active manner rather than passive

I'm going to start off with that list then: The first thing I think you need is a professional cd. If we record 3 or 4 songs, that's enough for booking and promotion. It's great if you have a bunch of cds already, if you have full-length cds already recorded, but when we're booking shows, like I said, I think it really only needs to be three or four songs tops. You don't have to have a 14-song cd, uou really don't, and in some ways I think it's actually counterproductive to try to use a 14-song cd for booking and promotion in some respects. It's great for your fans, it's great for building a fan base, but for actual booking and promoting yourself, I think you have to be more concise.

For example, when you send a cd to the radio station, they're going to listen to one song, maybe even only the beginning of one song. If they like the first twenty seconds of that song, they're going to listen to the next fifteen seconds. It's really that specific, and the same in a lot of ways with booking. If you contact a venue to play, they're probably not going to listen to a whole 14-song album. They're going to want something specific to listen to because they're in a hurry and they want it to jump out at them and say, yep, this person needs to be booked here.

So I want to have that professional cd. I think 4 songs is plenty and I want it to sound professional, it should have a good sonic palate. There should be no distortion, unless distortion is your thing. There should be none of that digital distortion, where it's clipping, recorded too loudly, and you tried to fix it later I want it to be mastered well so that it's as loud as other cds on the market. Now I also want it to look professional, so make some nice artwork for your cd or have someone make it. Now cd artwork is very simple to make using tools like Photoshop and other graphic arts tools. The simpler, the better, if you can just make your cd art based on one or two photographs, and then some text over the photographs, that's stylish, I think that's great, I don't see why it has to be more than that. Just make it so that your cd has a good look, an exciting look, and it has the critical information on it your name, your contact information, like your website address, your email address, your phone number, a way to get a hold of you so they can book you.

Remember, what we're trying to do here is booking and promotion.

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Booking and Promotion Checklist:

1) Professional CD (in sound and appearance)

2) Action Photo in color & B/W

3) Artist Profile One-Sheet

4) Matching Business Cards & Letterhead

5) Postcards/Flyers

6) Booking Contract

7) Performance One-Sheet

8) Press Reviews

9) Website with band name as domain name

10) At least one compelling story

11) A systematic way to do research, organize, and stay on task