The next great frontier for DesertSong

DesertSong has struggled– and continues to struggle –with how to get people to our events. We’ve seen the smiles, heard the applause and enjoyed the amazed comments on how good some of our artists are from our audiences. Yet we know that for every person actually AT our events, there are several others who would have been there and enjoyed themselves far more than they did watching TV or surfing the ‘Net, if only they had known what they were missing. We work tirelessly to keep the quality of our shows high, but that is not where we feel the greatest need to improve. It does no good to put on a great event if there’s no-one there, and indeed our events could be far better if we could get more people out to them. I just booked a house concert for June 27th, with a wonderful musician from South Florida, and his agent asked me about promotional materials. I sent her this response:

What seems to be working best here is 8½ x 11 flyers/posters and 5½ x 4¼ (4-up) buckslips (also known as handbills or invitations)
With the advent of the Internet, a whole new medium and area of effort has opened up for enterepreneurs, established businesses and the ever-resourceful shysters as well. It seems that every person dissatisfied with their present circumstance now has even more “opportunities” being thrust in their face, and a large portion of them have been persuaded that the Internet is the new magic bullet that will facilitate their getting rich quickly in their spare time. This appears (anecdotally from several friends who promote things professionally or semi-professionally) to have created a flood of individuals wishing to post business cards and flyers trying to drive traffic to their web sites, inundating supermarket and music store bulletin boards, and all the places we used to put posters and flyers and literature racks. In the LA area and the Bay Area of California, this has resulted in a majority of those formerly very fruitful posting locations either becoming so cluttered as to be useless, or closed by the proprietor. Now, we feel more confident of the effect of smaller (letter size and even 4-up) postings where they are still allowed, 4-up buckslips stacked on a Music Store or Coffee Shop counter or lit. rack, or -stronger still- a 4-up invitation passed from hand to hand with a personal recommendation like, “Hey, check out this cool Open Mike I’m going to Friday night!” It works for raves, so we’re hoping it will work for us. That’s what I’m developing my street team to do. We don’t yet have enough of a budget to have the buckslips printed commercially on heavy glossy stock, but anyone with an inkjet printer and a paper cutter can make paper invitations and spread them around, so I provide the PDF in hopes they will do that. It’s developing slowly, but we have high hopes.

Here are a few examples:

NEXT SHOWCASE FLYER NEXT SHOWCASE HANDBILL

NEXT HOUSE CONCERT FLYER NEXT HOUSE CONCERT HANDBILL

So, all you fans of live up-close-and-personal music, please jump on THIS bandwagon and support your local (and not-so-local) troubadors by spreading the word. Go get the PDF’s of flyers and handbills and pass them around. And if you post one somewhere, go back after the show and remove it, while posting something about the NEXT great even you want your neighbors to enjoy with you. That way, the store or office will be happy to let us keep posting there, because they know we will not just trash up their counter or bulletin board, but are actively working to promote love, joy, peace, prosperity and the American Way! (Glorious martial music fades in and you march off inspired to spread the joy)—WayneSL

PS- if this has inspired you to join our street team and promote live independent music, here’s the easy way: