[NewMusic] Promotion of New Music scene

[Matt Davignon]

I'll give you my most honest experience. I apologize if it's a little windy,
but there are a lot of points to touch on.

When I first started organizing shows (at Luggage Store and elsewhere), I'd
promote the shows as widely as possible - sending calendar items to the SF
Weekly/Bay Guardian, making sure the local radio calendars got it, printing
up little fliers and of course, distributing to all the "potentially
interested" email lists I could think of.

I have to admit, when you put that all together, it does get exhausting.
Many of these avenues lead to dead ends more often than not - either they
don't pick it up, or you don't get any audience members from them. For
example, 3 or 4 times a year the SF Weekly or Guardian will do a nice
feature on one of our musicians or events, but other than that, they've only
printed my calendar submissions about 1 out of 3 times. (Even in the tiny
print events calendar.)

Radio has been getting better recently. KFJC and KUSF have been friendly
recently, when it comes to doing on-air appearances. KALX has some friendly
djs who will play our stuff, but I haven't successfully gotten anyone an
interview there yet. Even KPFA has some friendly shows for noise music and
ambient-ish music. The Luggage Store series has organized weekly ticket
giveaways at both KUSF and KALX. I think KALX gradually lost interest, but
KUSF is still good to us. It is a little bit of a let down when the dj
offers free tickets and nobody calls for them, which happens about half the
time. All the above stations have been great in my recent experience about
including music listings on their on-air calendars.

Regarding little print cards distributed at venues: I do think they are
effective...not so much in getting new people as they are in helping the
regular fans to remember the event.

In trying to get features/interviews on local radio or press, I feel that I
were to bug them every time I have a show, they'd get tired of me pretty
quick, so I save those efforts for shows that I think are fairly major, or
will be of particular interest to the paper/station. For example, I do a
really big push for SFEMF.

We simply don't have the stamina to do a major publicity push every week at
the Luggage Store, so we do the things that have been the most effective:
bayimproviser/transbay calendar, a few experimental music lists, and KUSF
events calendar. The least attended shows tend to be ones where the
musicians do no promotion of their own.

I do think an effective thing would be to point some efforts towards venues
that don't have our music as frequently, but have those audiences that might
be interested. This includes ATA, shows at Yerba Buena, Hemlock Tavern, as
well as certain "out" shows at places like Cafe Du Nord and Bottom of the
Hill. I think those would be excellent places to put a 'newbie-friendly'
version of the Transbay Calendar.

Matt


On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 7:44 PM, Alicia Byer <aliciabyer at gmail.com> was
like:

> re: low turnouts....
>
> What are the PR things that happen for most shows? I know that somebody
> has figured this out more than me, but I'm just curious. Does the
> Transbay Calendar drop calendars off in many different places? I can
> think of a lot of bookstores and music places and bars/hangouts off the
> top of my head that could use some. Maybe the Transbay could have a more
> "flyer-type ad thing" instead of just the calendar, which you pretty
> much have to be hip to already to know what it is.
>
>  I know that shows are listed in the papers but I think a lot of people
> that aren't musicians don't get into this music because they're just not
> exposed, not because they already hate experimental/new music. It's
> like.. most people just get into what their friends are into, which
> inevitably links back to pop music somehow, unless you have a friend
> that plays the freaky saxophone or went to Mills, so.. I think that's
> why all the audience members are already freaky musicians.
>
> What about a PR compilation CD-R!!! haha just kidding.
>
> alicia