As the boys are finishing up the last of the construction projects in the room, I’ve turned my focus to filling our calendar. If you haven’t checked it out, you can see our confirmed shows HERE.
I started with a couple of agents I already have a working relationship with, for artists I knew would do well in our room. After that, it was kind of a treasure hunt.
We began building a list of interesting artists we found on Pandora and Spotify several months ago.
When I got serious about looking at them, I set up a Trello board, which is a super easy app to use if you need to keep an ongoing project organized. We wanted artists that have that “X Factor”, something compelling that would make it easy to get excited about and promote. Their style needs to mesh with ours and they need to be based on this side of the country – no further west than Texas. Perhaps most importantly, they need to still be playing rooms similar in size to ours.
After a couple weeks of online sleuthing, I became adept at figuring out if we had a shot at getting someone we were looking at. I became familiar with other live music venues and I knew whether they were 100-200 seat rooms, or the next level up – small theaters with 300-500 seats. I also realized a quick and dirty way to gauge this is to peek at the number of fans they have on their Facebook page. If they have 5,000 to about 20,000, chances are good they are the right size for us. Any more than that, they are probably playing bigger rooms. Any smaller, I would be concerned about selling enough tickets.
I got my first disappointing “thanks, but no thanks” from an agent before I even made an offer. I was super-excited about a young up and coming band and they are LITERALLY driving right through Syracuse not once, but TWICE in January – I thought for sure we could get them. I have to assume it’s because we’re a brand new venue and they didn’t want to take the risk? But it still stung.
Womp, womp…
Oh well…Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?
Shockingly, January, February and March are NOT popular times for artists from Nashville and Austin to venture up to the frozen tundra of CNY on tour. While they are missing out on the joy of the snowglobe that is Syracuse in winter, I can’t say I blame them.
But, our calendar is filling in a little more every day. We’ve got shows scheduled for Bob Halligan Jr.’s Paul the Beatle before he heads off on tour, bluegrass duo The Cadleys in February, Philly-based Jeffrey Gaines in April, followed by the Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Band, Chris Trapper and The Erin Harpe Country Blues Trio in May.
And – I’ve still got lots of “holds” out there waiting to be confirmed.
We’ve sold a bunch of pre-sale tickets already, and it’s exciting to see everything finally coming together! If you want to check out any of these artists, you can head over to our EVENTS page and you’ll find photos, a video, and links to their websites and social media channels.
