This seems like more of a question for the Librarian and Archivist Panel. I think they'll be discussing cataloging and taxonomies on Questionland next week .

But seriously, who and what is the organization for? Is it just for you, so you can find what you want when you want it? Do other people use it too? Are you interested in genre categories as a way of reminding/inspiring yourself to listen to more of your collection?

All of those factors would contribute to what you end up doing.

When I had more vinyl than I do now, I usually just went alphabetical, to the extent I even did that. I get kind of overwhelmed trying to classify things.

In iTunes, I rarely use genre categories. I like to make smart playlists based on play counts and skip counts, so I get a mix of stuff I haven't heard that much of along with favorites. But there's no genre involved in that. It's just the variety mix, so to speak.

If I want to make a genre playlist, I just put it together manually, or I use a program like Music IP DJ, which is like a slightly more sophisticated iTunes Genius or Pandora for your iTunes library.

But vinyl is a different mindset for sure. Unless you have a record changer, it's one thing at a time.

Few people in your position wouldn't like to outsource this task to somebody else. But few people in your position will be able to find this sort of person to take you on, especially in the present climate.

People with credible skills and strong references are hard to come by. Their plates are generally quite full. Either they are too big for your project, or they are too busy scrambling with the bands they already have trying to make a living off them.

I don't mean to sound flip, but at the start (and often well after the start), the booking agent thing is a don't call us we'll call you scenario.

Unless the agent saw you in the flow of their game (perhaps opening for one of their bands) or you were referred to them by somebody they trust (e.g., a club booker or somebody at your label if you are on a label with some credibility), they probably will not take you on unless you are already making a fair amount of stuff happen on your own.

If you are making stuff happen on your own, then you will get onto their radar that way, and at that point, you may not be approaching them anymore. They may be approaching you.

This leaves you with two options in the mean time: (1) keep booking your own shows; (2) see if there is some inexperienced but passionate friend of yours who might be willing to take on this task.

Both of these options have their pluses and minuses. If you DIY it, you'll learn a lot about how the show-booking process works and any headway you make doing it will be equity that you own, because you will have established relationships with club bookers that you can continue to fall back on as the years go by (even if you get in a new band).

If you get a friend to help you, you don't have to do it, which can be a plus, and if they end up having any aptitude for the game, you may end up in a better situation than if you'd signed with a more "credible" agent, because your friend is passionate about your thing, and his or her success is more dependent on your success than an agent with more prestige and power.

More than one of those more "credible" agents you mentioned in your question started out in the agent biz by being that passionate friend who was willing to help book a band that nobody else believed in early in the curve (the same goes for band managers too).

On the other hand, if your friend is incompetent, you'll wish you had kept doing it yourself.

Julian,
I think the best first step is to work on bands you would like to play with in various cities. That way you can have ideas to present to a booking agent at a club. I always ask touring bands (unless they are huge and will bring people in on their own) to give me ideas of locals. I don't even confirm a band from another city who is unknown without a local anchor.
It's best to focus on just few clubs you deem the best for your style of music. Many bands don't do research on clubs ahead of time and invariably I get blink 182 or dave matthews style bands asking to play the comet and I am dumbfounded. You are better off playing a house party in a city to a few appreciative souls than a crappy club date. Good timing on booking August. I am already holding dates for touring acts in that month right now! Good luck

Agents of change:

*compelling musical performances that make me cry
*talented lyricists that transport me, and ultimately help me understand another world
*passionate musicians willing to pursue their art against great adversity

Perhaps they're trying to avoid needing to have Cab Calloway as a backup for when the front men run out of gas and the crowd gets restive.

Good Question.

I've always been a big believer that when it comes to music you should never hire someone to do something until there is so much work you can't do it yourself. Not to be a broken record but the days of other people doing it for you, especially in an artist’s development stage, are long gone. It used to be that developing artists dreamed of signing to a label, it seems that finding a good booking agent has replaced that dream. The thing is that most good agents are only interested in taking on new clients if they have built something to begin with. Booking agents get paid a percentage on what the bad makes at shows so 15% of $50 is not going to keep their lights on. Now they will obviously take on new clients that are developing if they think they are going to mature into a bigger act. This would usually be based on the band being signed to a label, established manager, publisher, or blown up in the press/blogs/etc.

You may have an easier time hiring a publicist. Hopefully they at least have relationships with the writers and tastemakers that will help you build a little buzz around what you’re doing. Ultimately a publicist is only a magnifying glass so they can only do so much to get coverage. It all depends on how the music/live performance resonates with people. Over the years I’ve seen some bands spend a lot of money trying to get press and get nothing and bands doing it themselves and get a ton. It all just depends on the music.

As for reputation. I would suggest the following for anyone you are thinking about hiring.
1) Do your research. Check them out, try to get recommendations, Google them and their company. Try to know as much about them before you approach them.
2) Ask them what they think they can realistically deliver. If you just getting started, ask them if they might consult with you a little bit to help you do some of the work yourself to begin with.
3) Ask them to give you an example of when they did not take on a client. This can tell you a lot. If they never turn anyone down, then you can tell that they are more interested in the steady pay check rather than building their own career/reputation.
4) Agree to all costs and services up front. Find out if you’re paying for mailings, phone bills, etc.

Lastly, rather than try to find someone with the contacts and the skills, why not become that person yourself. The more you learn about this stuff the better off you will be and it will either allow you to help yourself or be able to better judge the people you hire.

I'm not in any way involved in the music business, but I'll take a swing at answering this question anyway.

Answer: They can do so, but choose not to because 1) publishing and adhering to a schedule is more work then just saying, "we'll open at 8:00, and the bands will play sometime after that," then leaving customers guessing, and 2) people still choose to do business with Crocodile, Neumos, and Chop Suey, despite the lack of information you cited.

Asking this panel of experts here on Questionland counts as "Web 2.0", doesn't it?

The soundman has a direct business relationship with the club, who directly pays him. The band is only indirectly involved in this interaction--the soundman gets paid a fix fee regardless what comes out of the speakers during the course of the evening. In addition, the soundman's "boss" is almost never there for soundcheck or even performances, so they're happily unaware of what's going on, and largely indifferent to the whining of spoiled musicians who show up late, play too loud and lie about their draw. In addition, the bulk of bands will play a given club only a few times, spaced months apart. Between the turnover of bands, soundmen and club ownership, a soundman can safely fuck people over for years without suffering repercussions.

Venues make a lot, or even most of their money off of alcohol sales. It's in their interest to get you sitting around with nothing to do except drink, so there's little incentive to run things on as tight a schedule as say, a movie theatre.

"How do we find a balance in this relationship?"

Great question.....Why not ask the booking person about sound checks before the gig and get it in writing?

When you arrive at the club, ask the sound person if they will be serving as stage manager for the evening and if you need to readjust the schedule for any reason.

Refer to your written schedule you received from the booker and work with the sound person to get what you need. Always calm assertive energy, no reason to be confrontational or respond to someone else's bad attitude.

We're all at the venue to make good music and transcend the limits of space and time into a blissful musical universe. Even though feedback blares through floor monitors, set times get bumped, and sound checks shortened, everybody has to keep a cool head and stay focused on ........

.........THE MUSIC!

I encourage you to rethink the wallpaper analogy. Bookers and restauranteurs will sniff that 'tude a mile away and won't touch it with a 10 foot poostick...unless of course, they want wallpaper.

Playing music is a fine art. Crafting a compelling musical performance that
fits the needs of different venues is part of that art, as is the business
smarts and savvy it takes to figure out how to get paid while doing it.

Remember "PLAY THE ROOM"

Recorded music never had much value in the marketplace--the money paid by consumers was to pay off the middlemen. Once people didn't have to pay, they decided that "nearly zero" was an appropriate price.

Live music at the local level serves as a marketing tool for alcohol/coffee vending sites.

I second by again mentioning Davey Brozowski of "Black Whales" who play Chop Suey on June 11th.

I'll add Ethan Jacobsen of the new two-piece "My Goodness".

You can find and listen to both these bands on their Myspace page.

Sounds like you feel like your scene isn't well represented. I can relate,
but with few exceptions, an artistic movement, sound, or style, flourishes AFTER the keys to success have been put in place.

Consider creating cool shows with bands you like, work with a promoter, foster a sense of community through music, volunteer at radio stations, and keep people
excited about the music you love by talking talking talking about it.

Yeah, sounds like you're on the right track.
Just dig deeper into the business of "Promoting"
and I'm sure the process will become clear.

With any business, it's about who you know, so
create good relationships with everyone from artists
to club managers, to booking agents, and never forget
the venue staff.

I'm definitely not digging the way ticketing for Bumbershoot is running this year, especially if the rumored change of the daytime mainstage requiring a pass goes through, but I don't think that one can rest at the feet of AEG. There's definitely still tons of quality bands rolling through, and I haven't noticed a huge spike in ticket prices, although some events could be better managed I guess. It's definitely a plus keeping the showboxes in play, but could they come up with a better name for the former Phoenix (hey, just call it the Phoenix, or something, cuz Showbox SoDo is stupid)...and the fact that they now own three of the major venues in the area is a bit bothersome

By and large, pop music is about melody, not rhythm. If you want to listen to great drumming check out Fusion (terrible to listen to unless you're a musician), Gospel, or go see a pop star live. However, I think good drumming is more about having fantastic groove and taste than about how many flashy fills or complex rhythms you can play. To oversimplify: John Bonham is the greatest rock drummer of all time because of When The Levee Breaks, not Moby Dick.

Some other awesome Seattle drummers:
Jason McGerr of Death Cab for Cutie (best indie rock drummer out there today, period.)
Bradyn Krueger of The Lonely Forest (BEAST!)
Davey Brozowski of Black Whales (so good at writing interesting, original and tasteful drum parts without being overbearing)
Saba Samakar of Dyno Jamz (killer groove)

I remember I used to think a lot like this - that artists didn't need labels and they were for the most part greedy and only cared about the bottom line. However, after being in a band that only has a very minor amount of success (Great Waves), it's clear that being in a label would make things a lot easier.

Let's paint a picture here, using my band as a case study:

The four main members of Great Waves all work full time to do two things: pay rent and pay for recording. We could do the home route or go to a cheap studio, but we want professional sounding recordings, something that is indistinguishable from what you'll hear on the radio. This costs A LOT of money (on our last EP - only 3 songs - we spent somewhere around 8k). The money that we've made is nowhere near the money that we've spent, and we don't have any plans to tour considering that when you're first starting out you almost never make money on tour.

As well as rehearsing, playing gigs, and writing, we are also in charge of all our booking and marketing. With this on top of our day jobs we have our hands completely full. It's difficult enough when you're a local band, I can't even imagine the headache that comes with going national.

To address the underlying assumption that record labels are greedy - Napster did a really good job of addressing that. After profits from record sales plummeted, there aren't many people who are still in the record business for the money (major labels aside). In my limited experience, labels mostly consist of overworked and underpaid music lovers who truly want to help great music get made. There are some fantastic local labels like Sub Pop, Hardly Art and Barsuk who do this every day, and the Seattle music scene would be way worse off without them.

I do think there is a valid debate as to whether a label is necessary if you have a fan base that has proven they will support you financially and the means and drive to do much of the business side yourself or through independent agents/managers/publicists/publishers, and it's clear that new revenue streams need to be explored to compensate for loss recording profits. However, in my opinion the debate of whether or not record labels are necessary/nothing but evil is mostly done by people who don't have the first clue about what it takes to make it in the music business.

The first question I would ask is why do you want to go on tour? What level is your band at? How well do you do locally? If you want to go on vacation (spend a bunch of your own money) and play some music then sure, try to go on tour but if you are going to go on tour to try to build your bands career, then you want to be as smart as possible about doing it.

Here are a few realities-
1) There are more bands on tour right now than ever. Playing live is one of the only consistent ways for bands to make money so almost every band that is bigger or more well known than your band is already touring a lot.
2) There are only so many venues, so many slots per night and so much audience in every city
3) What does it get you if you drive 600 miles to play for the bartender and the sound person because you had no promotion?

The bottom line is that if you are going to go on tour, you need to have started building a story about your band. The booking agents are looking for bands that have some sort of promotional support behind them. That could be anything from being on a label (big or small), press/blog coverage, extensive social networking or more well known band association. They are trying to put bands in their room every night that will draw a crowd to sell drinks. If no one comes to the show, no one drinks and they lose money. Now, agents will take chances based on how much they like the music or if they think the band is growing and they are making an investment on making money with them in the future.

So you are thinking WTF? How am I ever going to get out on the road?

Well…here is what I would suggest. Rather than trying to set out on a west coast or national tour, I would focus on what ever you can do within a 300 mile radius of Seattle. If you have anything happening here in town at all then it will be easier to explain it to agents in Bellingham, Vancouver BC, Portland, Eugene, Spokane, Tacoma, Etc. You can do all of these shows in quick shots. There were a number of times back in the day where my band would play Portland and drive down after work and come back that night to go to work the next day. You try to set it up where you’re playing once every month or 6 weeks in each of these markets and you try to build an audience. If you’re good (always the most important part) then word of mouth will spread along with the other bands you’ll meet in every town. Use that internet machine to reach out to as many people as possible in every city as well and try to get them to com out to your shows. IF you can build up the Northwest circuit, you’ll be in a much better position to either attract a booking agent that can help put a national tour together or have more of a story to tell to book it your self.

The Exceptions…

If your best friend plays guitar in the Cave Singers and they want you to come down and open for them in SF and LA or wants to take you on tour…sure! Go do it. You know you’ll be playing in front of people and it’s worth the trip. If your band gets into SXSW or CMJ, it’s probably worth spending the money to go down there just to meet as many people as possible and have access to the majority of the music industry in one location.

Doing all this stuff is a lot of work, but hopefully a lot of fun as well. If it’s not fun, then you should ask yourself why you are doing it?

Remember, if it was easy, everyone would do it.

Good Luck.

I would love to see this. I've gotten burned before for thinking the stated time is an hour or two earlier than the opening band actually starts. In once case, the opening band who I wanted to see actually started at the printed time. There's no way I want to sit around for an hour or two if I don't need to. I know bars want people to drink, but there's only so much you can drink (before having to constantly rush to the bathroom when the band you're there to see is performing).

As for legal issues, they can post to their own website and have a big "this may change" warning on the info.

You have to be flexible when you are booking a tour. Period. Unless you are U2. I bet they aren't super flexible.

I always think that the best way for an out-of-town band that does not have agent to get a show is to join forces with an in-town band with some local connections. Venues the size of the Croc most likely have a pretty large overhead so taking a risk on the unknown can be hard with our hedging your bets with a solid few locals.

Be open and flexible and get in touch with some like minded bands in in each city on your tour route.

I like the pithiness of Twitter as a promo tool. Give me 140 characters (or fewer) and a link and I'll check out your music, etc. Or not. But I probably will. (You have to convince me to follow you, of course, so be interesting. Thanks.)

Videos are an excellent way to promote, too. Clips on Vimeo are always buggy as hell, in my experience; I prefer YouTube.

Publishing set times leaves you open to all sorts of ticket refund complaints. Once you say something is going to happen at a certain time and publish it you are liable to make those things happen at those times. And pretty much every show ever is going to fall a little bit behind.

Most every weeknight show attempts to run on the same schedule. And weekends are just a little bit different.

Outside of the metal/prog/psych worlds, I think Mark Pickerel (Tripwires) and Faustine Hudson (Demon Rind, Whalebones, Chain & the Gang) both have a loose, syncopated style that works really well for their bands, even if not particularly intricate.

You know, I'm actually surprised I don't see more bands doing creative things with Facebook and Twitter and such. Tons of bands use these networks, but rarely do I see anyone do anything more than basic self-promotion.

When Soundgarden played that "secret" show at the Showbox, they gave away tickets via a scavenger hunt throughout the city by posting photos on Twitter--a couple bands have done stuff like that, and I think that's great! But you really have to have a good following of fans to make something like that successful/worth the effort.

I wonder why more bands don't make facebook pages to get on certain shows or to play certain clubs or something. Like, would Bumbershoot or the Capitol Hill Block Party (or anywhere else, for that matter) consider booking a band if they created a fanpage like "Get so and so to play Bumbershoot!"? Maybe not, but it'd be funny if a band tried something like that (and even better if they succeeded!)

When we did Go! Machine at the end of last year They Live (now Mash Hall) did some great videos on Vimeo that were a simple splicing together of some party scenes from cheeseball 80's films with the show info flashing over it. They were silly but really really funny and they got re-posted by a ton of people on Facebook and Twitter. Fresh Espresso did a similar thing for our anniversary show as well. Just short videos of them and their friends being goofballs. I think both example lent the sense that "hey this show is going to be fun!"

This is a cool question. Interested to hear what other people have to say.

I'll back you up on the larger point, Michael. KEXP is an adult contemporary station because that's what the stations listeners want to hear. All the indie rock kids from the last decade or more grew up, got themselves a good income and can now donate big chucks of money to still get their fill of that fresh "underground" sound that goes down a little more easily than Botch or Lightning Bolt.

What's even more laughable is the local show. I tuned in recently and heard three songs in a row from regional bands that no longer exist. Way to support local music.

I have tried to request local "hard rock" bands a few times on KEXP and get no response. Why would I want to help power KEXP then?

Describing your act to potential employers as "bland aural wallpaper" probably won't help. Why would someone want to hire you when they could just pop some musak on their house iPod?