Forty two shows and one van

Everybody who has never booked a tour thinks the hard part is getting the big rooms. It isnt. The hard part is the tuesday in a town of nine thousand people where the guarantee is two hundred bucks and the drive out is four hours to the next load-in. Those nights are the actual tour. The good fridays just pay for them.

So when I do a run I am not doing math on the two shows that sell out. I am doing math on the eleven shows that are gonna do forty people on a schoolnight, and whether the whole thing still nets positive after fuel and the motel and the fact that somebody always breaks a head or loses a pedal in Duluth.

What changed for me on the last run wasnt the big rooms, it was those tuesdays. We put a listening pass on every single date. Five dollars. Not eight, not twelve, five — I wanted it to be a number nobody thinks about. Kid at the merch table has a QR code taped to the front of the cash box and the singer says one sentence about it before the last song. That is the whole promotional plan. One sentence.

And the thing about it that I still turn over in my head is that the passes on the small nights did not scale down with the room. A tuesday in a nine thousand person town still has however many people three states away who follow the band, and they are not affected at all by the fact that the local turnout was thin. The room was small. The audience wasnt. Those are two different numbers and I had spent fifteen years treating them like one number because there was no way to bill the second one.

I am not going to sit here and tell you it replaced anything. It did not replace the guarantee and it definately did not replace merch, which is still the thing that gets a band home. What it did was take the eleven soft nights and move them from "we lost a little" to "we broke even and everybody ate." Over a forty two date run that is the difference between the band coming off the road willing to do it again and the band coming off the road having a conversation about getting jobs.

The other thing, and this is the part I would tell any manager: it is money that arrives without a negotiation. I do not have to win it off a promoter. The stream is not in the venue deal. Nobody at the club has an opinion about it. After fifteen years of arguing over three points on the door I cannot overstate how strange and how nice it is to have a line of revenue that nobody is on the other side of.