2 ways to sell tickets to your concert
Hey, musician! Want to put on a show? Regardless of how many shows you have under your belt, if you are playing 200-people venues every weekend or once a year (on a good year), you will be able to understand the concert promoting process a little better in just a few minutes. Buckle up.
Regardless of whether you are a musician, manager, booking agent, or concert promoter, putting on a show is all about your ability to sell tickets.
What are your options?
Well, we have the traditional way and the crowdfunding way.
Crowdfunding is a new, unexplored alternative, mostly used in album crowdfunding for now. Some festivals have tried it out, and select musicians and bands.
But let’s start with the traditional model. Here’s what’s it all about.
To be completely honest, the traditional way is about as fun as buying and selling stocks — promoters or bands themselves take a risk on a show and invest money in the production and promotion of an event that might not even sell enough tickets to cover the costs, let alone bring in profit.
This is actually the root of another problem in the music industry — incremental ticket price hike.
Essentially, fans are covering the bad investments of promoters and musicians: ticket prices go up to compensate for losses on some concerts, as well as to make concerts that don’t sell out still very profitable despite selling just a fraction of available tickets.
Another flaw of the traditional ticket selling model is unavailability of the audience data. All fan emails, or any contact information, along with stats like age, gender, interests and such are locked by the ticketing services that take care of the ticket distribution.
So you divide your tickets into quotas and distribute between ticketing services, but it a black box from there.
Did your fans buy the tickets? Or were those just local music lovers who are subscribed to a specific ticketing platform’s mailing list and looking for a fun night out with their friends? You’ll never know.
Yes, in the traditional model tickets are being distributed by a concert promoter and ticketing services, while an artist (or a band) gets their guarantees, meaning they don’t have to personally worry about the sales numbers, but is this model sustainable?
Concert crowdfunding addresses both of the issues: the financial risk and access to concertgoer stats.
If an artist decides to crowdfund an event, they are taking the financial risk completely off the table and some smart guerilla marketing and an active fan base can easily turn into good to excellent ticket sales.
How do ticket sales go in concert crowdfunding?
Step 1. Open the create concert crowdfunding campaign page(on Show4me, of course, the only network that offers concert-specific crowdfunding toolset).
Step 2. Fill out event title and description, add pics.
Step 3. Calculate show budget, including ticket prices and revenue (using the conveniently built-in calculator).
Step 4. Finish your filling out the campaign form and submit!
Step 5. Once your campaign is approved (by Show4me’s awesome and speedy support team), you can start promoting the upcoming show.
Did you notice how the process involves zero investment?
Sure, you need to contact your prospective venue, maybe talk to your team and fans, iron out the details and prepare some promotional materials, like photos, videos and posters, but the core of the process is simple and can be done by any artist pretty easily.
More good news — concert crowdfunding is a professional tool. This means tickets for a successfully funded event are generated and delivered to fan’s inboxes automatically. And all the stats on the fans is saved in the artist’s account. See how this makes further work that much easier?
After all the work put into promotion of one show, an artist who crowdfunded an event also ends up with stats on who attended the event, their average age, some basic info on their location or even time of arrival. Plus, they stay in the artist’s Artist club, getting all the news updates, new music, and new show announcements.
Sounds like a dream?
Well, it requires a bit of work, so it’s more like entrepreneurship, not a free ride. But it does save musicians and their teams from monetary losses for cases when they show planning mojo is off and not that many tickets sell, but the show has already been produced and a ton of money spent on fees, rent, accommodation, travel, and whatnot.
We actually just published a blog post on our blog, detailing the traditional concert promotion model vs the crowdfunding-based one a little further, so if you enjoyed this little update, go to our blog post here and read more on the topic!
Or, if you are ready to get that elbow grease going right away, create your Artist club at the Show4me Music Interaction Network right now (it’s forever free) and see how you can use concert crowdfunding to your professional advantage!
