Today’s Best Practices article is a guest post from Tess Cychosz, community manager at Sonicbids.
At Sonicbids, our mission is to Empower the Artistic Middle Class by helping every band get a gig. So, we want to highlight some of the major ways we can make your gig-getting experience the best. Check out a few tips here – and if you’ve found something else especially helpful for getting gigs, leave a comment and share the wealth!
1) Make sure your EPK™ is 100% complete with your best work.
Maybe this is an obvious point to you and you’re already there. If you are – awesome. Feel free to move on to number 2. If, however, you’ve still got some blank sections on your EPK, or you don’t have your best song first, stop everything that you’re doing right now. Members with a complete EPK have twice the success rate of artists with an EPK less than 50% complete. Head to the “Edit My EPK” section of your account and make sure that you’ve got each section of your EPK filled out with great content. And yes, that includes past calendar dates. Check out this article all about Building a Kick A** EPK.
2) Customize your Gig Notifications.
A gig notification is an email and our way of saying, “Hey, this opportunity might be a good fit for you.” But, in order for us to recommend you the most relevant gigs, we need to know your preferences. For example, if you’re just a songwriter and you don’t perform live, you can choose to only hear about songwriting contents and licensing opportunities. You can tell us you only want to hear about gigs for rock musicians. You can even tell us how often and when you’d like to hear about them. Just login to your account and click on “Gig Preferences” under your Shortcuts Menu to customize your gig alert notifications.
3) Use the Advanced Search in “Find Gigs.”
In the Find Gigs section, we have a very handy “Advanced Search” link. The Advanced Search helps you tailor your gig searches by things like submission fee, event date and location. This can be super helpful especially if you’re trying to fill in some dates for a tour (and when submitting, be sure to let the promoter know that you’ll already be in the area if you will be.).You can also check out just “Premium Gig Listings” or just “Musician’s Friend Token Listings” (which don’t cost you a penny to submit to).
4) Use your Tokens every month.
If you’re a Sonic member you get 10 tokens per month and if you’re a Supersonic member you get 25. So, you have either 10 or 25 promoters in our network to send your EPK to at no cost to your membership each month. In other words: you’ve got nothing to lose! Currently, over 65% of the gigs on Sonicbids are Token based, courtesy of our partner Musician’s Friend, so it’s a great opportunity to experiment submitting to gigs you may not have submitted to if they carried a fee. Head to the Find Gigs section and check them out.
5) Promote your Gigs.
We don’t want to leave you hanging after you got the gig, so we also have tools that allow you to connect with fans. First, you can manage all of your online profiles (Facebook, Twitter and others) from Sonicbids. This means if you get a gig, you can post it once on Sonicbids and it will sync to your social media sites. We also have a handy Facebook app called Sonicbids Artists Profiles that allows you to easily create a tab on your Facebook page with all of the content from your EPK (your music, calendar, bio, etc) on your Facebook page. Login and click on “Promote Gigs” in your navigation to see things like our Facebook App, calendar widget, and more.
Not a Sonicbids member? You can sign up for a two week free trial here. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @Sonicbids – we’re tweeting daily about tips, awesome gigs and industry happenings.
