Venues

 There are many places for bands to get heard. Whether it's on the internet, at a venue, or a street corner, everywhere is a potential venue. In this blog post, I'm going to explore some venues, and see which one has the better opportunities.

When people talk about venues, I normally picture a room with a PA, a stage and a bar. Most places are like this (with some variations of course). Being in a band, it's not as easy as just booking a gig in a proper venue dedicated to live music. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not as easy as doing up your shoelaces. Some obvious venues include: Pubs, clubs, theaters, arenas, etc. Getting pub gigs is rather easy, but as the size of the venue increases, so does the difficulty of getting a gig. One of our tutors came up with a genius idea. Clubs are becoming evermore popular with younger generations. The amount of people that pay to go into a dark, sweaty room and drink themselves into a mess is phenomenal. And who provides the music? A DJ. Most people nowadays know a DJ. I, for one, know about 6. If a band or artist were to take one of their tracks and make either a DnB or Dubstep remix, you could ask one of your friends to play this when they next work. This could get so much promotion for your band!

I'm going to go at this from a certain viewpoint. I'm going to discuss these ideas from potential audience. For example, you could get 100 people in a pub to hear your music, whereas if you were playing an arena, there's a potential 2-3000. Of course, 100 is better than none, and 3000 is obviously better than 100. But what if there was a way to have a constant flow of new listeners while you're playing? Is that possible?

Yes. Busking.We've all seen buskers in our lifetimes. Whether it's an old accordion player sat outside the town hall, or a violinist outside McDonalds. As people, we normally turn up our noses and walk on like it's nothing special. But these buskers have the master plan. They're out there, playing they're instrument to thousands of people that walk past, and even earning a bit of cash when a generous person walks past with some change.

So what's stopping us from doing that? We could set up a small band, sit out in the sun, play our music and be heard. It seems almost too good to be true. The fact you could have a river of people walking past and every one of them hears your music. On a busy summers day, town is usually jam packed, so there could be thousands upon thousands walking past. Although in most cities you require a busking license, no one can stifle you. People can only tell you to move on. And if that happens, come back tomorrow. And keep coming back.

As well as busking, there's a thing musicians do called a 'living room tour'. This is when an artist or a band is paid, and they set up in someone's living room and play a gig. This would be an amazing experience to see, and it's definitely surreal to actually perform it. Fenton have been hired for a living room gig before, and it went down extremely well. We earned a fair amount of money from it, and we even got free food!