I have been thinking that I have been in this situation before. The situation where you are constantly trying to be in front of your audience and keep them interested in your business.
From 2000 – 2004 I was the manager of a local hard rock band. It fit nicely with our online music store at the time. I met the band called Alkai Diggins in 1999 when they just graduated high school and did a in-store show which brought a huge crowd to my little cd store. So looking at the sales of the night we asked them back. Our store promoted many bands in the area, but this band brought a huge crowd of people of all ages. The band members would visit me and talk about their plans of breaking into the local Seattle scene. I was intrigued! I was asked to manage their band and I had no idea how to manage a rock band that consisted of 5 boys who wrote all their own music. So I became their manager and my husband Tracy was their roadie. For years I promoted the band and traveled to California, Oregon, and all over Washington.
This experience of promoting a band took some time. We would play in the really bad dives of Everett and other cities that were so close to Seattle but not there yet.. The goal of the band was to play in nice clubs in Seattle, open for big bands and record cds. We did all of these things and played almost every weekend in Seattle for a few good years. I will tell you going in the back doors in the alley ways at 3am, driving a bunch of smelly boys on the road and staying up way too late was one of the best times Tracy and I had. Those boys worked hard and we fought hard to get into nice venues and actually made pretty good money at those shows and sold out a few too. We also made a 11 song cd with cover art and sold it in every store we could, including big Franchises. I would mail 100′s of cds to radio stations and online music stations. We had a coffin guitar case that we dressed up with Christmas lights and I sold their cds and t-shirts at shows. This taught me so many great skills in marketing and this was right before MySpace and Facebook! Flyers, posters and emails and an awesome website were how we got the word out back then.
So if I can promote a 5 member hard rock band, I can promote anything!
