20 Ways To Get Gigs I Wish I Knew 10 Years Ago

The speaker ranks different strategies for musicians to get gigs, from best to worst. Strategies like posting flyers, DMing professional bands, and creating a website are considered ineffective. Networking at local shows is seen as a potential opportunity, but not the most effective. Reaching out to local venues is a common but not great way to get gigs, while reaching out to local promoters is a better option. The best strategy is creating an outbound system to reach out to venues, promoters, and other potential gig opportunities. Following up with these contacts is also important. For solo musicians, busking can be a decent option if used to create a viral video. Other strategies include using musician meetup websites, posting on Craigslist, befriending local bands, and creating a highlight video to showcase skills. Reaching out to local churches can also be beneficial. What are the best and worst ways for musicians to get gigs? Well, today I'm going to be ranking 20 strategies on a tier list from S for Super to F for Fail. And at the end, I'll crown one of them as the best of the best, and another as the worst of the worst. And trust me, I've tried almost all of these, and some have kept me as a basement drummer for years, and others have helped me grow into a professional musician that's allowed me to perform in front of 500,000 people this year alone. To reach S tier, the strategy has to have these three elements. One, it must grow your credibility. Two, it must grow your audience. And three, it must be an opportunity that gives you growth or an opportunity that gives you income in the long run. With that in mind, let's see the best and worst ways to achieve these goals possible, starting off with three rapid-fire Fs. Posting local flyers either trying to find a gig or promote your gig. Now, posting flyers does not improve your credibility, might make you look desperate, and it won't give you a future growth opportunity because most people are ignoring flyers unless you're doing this. Posting flyers is going straight to F tier. Now, how about DMing professional bands, asking if your band can open for them? Speaking from experience, this strategy will instantly get ignored, especially because these bands get people asking them for stuff every single day, straight to F tier. Now, a lot of solo musicians like to spend a ton of time making a nice, sexy website. There's just one problem. No one is going to your website. F tier. So what about simply going to local shows and trying to network? I have bad news. I think it's mostly a waste of time. Does it grow your credibility? No, because you're just there as an audience member. Does it grow your audience? No, because you're not performing. Does it potentially give you a future opportunity if you make the right connection? Yes, potentially. And for that reason, I'm going to put it in C tier. But I think networking is most effective when you are someone who is performing and you can connect with other performers. It makes the introduction a lot less awkward. Now, there's probably a huge chunk of people thinking getting gigs is all luck. But personally, I think that is one of the most toxic mindsets you can have. The truth is, those who are better at their craft, those who are better at networking, those who are better at marketing, end up having a lot more luck. And whether you like it or not, as a gigging musician or band, at some point, you are going to have to reach out to other people to get more gigs. There are four strategies to reach out to other people to get more gigs, and only one of them is S tier. I call them gig creators, and we're going to start off with reaching out to local venues. Now, in my local band days, I was the one who was in charge of getting my band gigs. So one strategy I employed was reaching out to venues. And a lot of the time, they would say yes, which was really exciting. And after hours and hours of rehearsals, and then packing up all our gear, and loading it up to the venue, and playing our hearts out for 30 minutes, I realized I'm only performing to eight people right now, and those eight people are also playing this show. And that's why reaching out to local venues is an easy way to get a gig, but not an easy way to get a good gig. And that's why I'm ranking this as C tier. But there is a better way to do this, and that is reaching out to local promoters. What you'll find is that venues are very bad at promoting shows, but local promoters are very good at promoting shows, which means better shows. And it was an opportunity to wow the promoter and build a good relationship with that person so that they could give my band more opportunities in the future. That's why reaching out to local promoters is A tier. Now guys, we've got our first S tier strategy here, and I can guarantee you it's not something you'd expect, and honestly, it's not even something that I see almost anyone do. And that is creating an outbound system to systematize getting gigs. I know, it's a super sexy name. I wonder why no one's doing it. But here's how you can do it in an instance. Step one is to ask ChatGBT to give you all of the local promoters near you, all the local venues near you, coffee shops, open mic nights, bars, anywhere that you could potentially play a gig at. Ask to put it in a spreadsheet so that in an instant you have a spreadsheet and contact information of everywhere near you that you could play. And that brings us to step two, where you reach out to all of these places with this exact email. And step three, dedicate an hour every day to reaching out to all of these places. I guarantee you if you do this, you will end up having way more gigs. And that's why this is such a powerful strategy and why it is ranked as S tier. If you're a drummer who wants to work with me and my team personally to help you implement this system for yourself, along with helping you get pro-level skills so that you can land the best gigs possible, then apply for our Rockstar Drummer Mentorship right up here. Now, after you reach out to all these people, a very important strategy comes up next. And that is following up. Now, be careful with this one because there are two extremes. Some people reach out way too much and destroy their relationships with their local venues and promoters, which moves this strategy straight to F tier. And some people never follow up at all, and their email gets lost in the void. Now, I recommend following up about two times within a 10-day period, then waiting about 45 to 60 days before reaching out again. Now, if you follow up in that way, I move this strategy to A tier. Now, let's rank some categories for musicians who aren't in a band and are looking to find their perfect gig, starting with busking. Busking has the potential to either be a D tier or an A tier if you just perform outside of an event on your own. Then you might be able to make a little bit of money, which checks one of our boxes, but it won't grow your audience and it won't grow your credibility. However, if you use this opportunity to create a killer video format around this style, it then immediately checks those other boxes. For example, check out this video that has over 200 million views. Now, coming up, we've got a bunch of ways for musicians to grow their network. And if you didn't know, networking is one of the most powerful strategies you can use to get more gigs. But only one of these is S tier. We're going to start with an obscure strategy, which is musician meetup websites. Now, these are websites that are essentially Tinder for musicians, right? You say, hey, my name's Gabe, I'm a drummer, I'm looking for a metal gig. And then hopefully a guitar player finds my profile and says, yo, let's start a band together. And we freaking do. Even though this can sound silly as an option, it actually works. And if you don't believe me, this is how my band, I Prevail, got started. In two Grammy nominations, 10 gold records, and a platinum record later, I can say that bandmix.com worked out pretty well for our band. And because of that variability there, I'm going to put this at A tier. Now, on the opposite side of this, where there's no community, but a really easy way to post is Craigslist. I have many friends that have found really solid gigs through postings on Craigslist. So even though it's the ugliest website in the whole world, I would not discount it. And as long as you don't include any pictures of your feet in your postings, I'd say this is a solid B tier option. Now, what about becoming friends with other local bands that are further along in their journey than you? Now, something my local band used to do all the time, but you can even do this as a musician on your own, is create a cover song of one of these band's songs and post it. Because that band is most likely not so far out of reach, they're going to see it and you might be the first person who's ever covered one of their songs, which is going to mean a lot to them, which can either result in a relationship developing. They might even repost it on their page or on their stories. And if you crush it, they might keep you in mind to play future bigger shows with them. So if you utilize this correctly, I think it's a solid B tier strategy. And the next strategy is a video that highlights your skills as a musician or your skills as a band. Now, if you take the time to create a well-produced video of you performing to the best of your ability, it showcases you in your best possible light. What you can do is you can include these in all of the reach-outs that we've mentioned up until this point. And I promise you, if this is good, it will instantly 4X your chances of landing a solid gig. Because most people who are posting on these sites, they have no videos of them playing. If they do, the video sucks. All you have to do is just take time and effort to showcase yourself in the best possible way. You will instantly stand out from 90% of all of the other musicians on these sites. When me and I Prevail got connected, the first thing they asked for were videos of me playing. And thankfully, I already had them. It grows your credibility. It can grow your audience or your network because you're including them in these postings. Or you can also post them on social media, which grows your audience as well. And it gives you future opportunities for growth because you're including them in these postings. And for that reason, a highlight video is S-tier. Now, one strategy that was really helpful for me was reaching out to local churches because churches are always looking for more musicians to come play. Now, regardless of what you believe, it allows you to check a lot of the boxes. For me, it allowed me to build my network of musicians and surround myself with other players who are a lot better than me, which is the number one hack for getting better faster. After a little bit of time of playing for free, eventually I was able to earn income from playing at churches as well. And I gained a lot of future opportunities, not only from playing at other churches, but these musicians played in other bands that I was eventually able to play for. And surprisingly enough, this is how I made my connection to get the I Prevail audition. The only thing keeping this from S-tier for me is that there's a lot of variety here and there might not be churches in your area or there might only be very small ones in which you can't really get connected. So I'm going to put this at A-tier. Now let's move to a couple of one-off strategies and see what we've got there, starting off with reaching out to local radio, news channels, and newspapers. I'm going to right away put this as a D-tier strategy because these are channels that are shrinking year over year, and plus, it's really hard to actually get featured on these channels. So overall, not a great strategy. Now if you're a band, you probably want to record the best single that you possibly can to gain more traction to be able to post it. The problem is, most bands release really crappy music. The bands who spend a lot of time crafting a really killer single put no marketing effort into it at all. But if you can create a killer single and combine it with all of these cold outreaches that you're doing, then you've got a really, really solid strategy on your hands. So because of all of these variables, I'm going to put having a killer single as a B-tier strategy, as crazy as that is. Now for any musician or band, one of the most important things that you can have is an audience. But how do you do this? Well, the next two strategies are audience builders. And one of them is posting videos online, and the other one is creating your own gigs. Now one of these can be an amazing strategy, and the other one can end up being a total waste of time. So which one do you think is more effective? Well, let's start off with creating your own gig. What does this actually mean? Well, this is when you actually go out and you rent a space to play a concert for the night. Now this is a great way to build performance reps, increase the musician's success cycle of learning the set, rehearsing, and then performing. However, then you become not only the performer, you become the renter of the building, the promoter for the show, and you're on the hook for all expenses. And typically, you just end up playing for your friends and family, which doesn't really put you in front of new audiences. It doesn't really grow your future opportunities. So for that reason, I would put this as a C-tier strategy. Now what's crazy is that playing bigger and better gigs and building a better audience comes from actually not playing shows, and instead, posting online and building your online following. For example, the first show that I Prevail played was in front of 40 people. You wanna know how many people were at the second show? 1,200 people to a sold-out crowd. Now, what happened between show one and show two? Well, on the first show, I Prevail had no online following. They just hopped on a local show and played to whoever was there. In between that time, they posted a heavy metal version of the Taylor Swift song that went absolutely viral and immediately skyrocketed them to playing to thousands of people. And I know what you're thinking. Okay, so your strategy was just getting really lucky with one video that you guys posted? Well, was it luck or was it a very specific marketing strategy? The band took one of the biggest artists of all time, covered one of their biggest singles of all time, then put their own spin on it, and then made the song as good as they possibly could and filmed the best video that they possibly could with the resources that they had at the time. Yes, there might be a little bit of luck in there, but 80% of that is very solid strategy. So if you're a musician or a band and you can figure out a way to replicate something that's already viral and make it your own and present it to a new audience, it's an immediate shortcut to building your online audience, which can actually transfer to playing bigger and better shows. So if you do this right, posting online videos and building an audience is an S-tier strategy. Now, let's talk about a couple obscure one-off strategies, starting off with open mic nights. Now, this is tricky because some open mic nights can actually have a dedicated focused audience on who's performing, and some are just at a coffee shop where no one is paying attention at all. The benefits, of course, is it builds performance reps, which just gets you better playing in front of live audiences. The downsides is it's typically not a great way for building a consistent audience because in some cases, people might not be paying attention to you, and it might even hurt your credibility a little bit because some of those experiences can be really awkward. So because of the variability here, I'm gonna put open mic nights as a C-tier strategy. Now, one strategy I've oddly had a lot of experience with is music competitions. One of my very first bands called Lookout Gabe entered a battle of the bands that was statewide, held at a venue that could hold almost 3,000 people. They selected only 10 bands to battle it out, and we got selected for one of them. The benefit is that this was actually hosted by a newspaper at the time, the Detroit Free Press, and there was a decent amount of promotion behind it so we got to play in front of a lot of people. Now, even though we didn't win, we got a lot of exposure, we got to really put in a lot of reps, and we played in front of a big audience. And finally, I entered another music competition much later with another band that was online through MTV. Now, this one was all votes-based, so you had to get all your friends and family to vote, which in theory was a complete waste of time, but we were in first place for so much of the competition, but then at the last minute, a band called American Authors dethroned us and won the competition, and as a result, they won a car, and then immediately after that, they had a song that exploded that got over a billion streams. Funnily enough, years later, I actually ended up touring with this band on Warped Tour and talked about the whole experience, which was just really funny. So these competitions have a lot of variability. They can be a bit of a crapshoot, but it forces you to put your best foot forward and get yourself out there. For that reason, I'm gonna say it's a B-tier strategy. All right, so we've got to crown the best of the best and the worst of the worst strategies for getting more gigs. Starting with the worst of the worst, I'm gonna say posting flyers around is the worst. It is a huge waste of time. It's a waste of money. Don't do it, it's bad. But the best of the best, I'm actually going to split the crown between two strategies, and that is an outbound system to get more gigs tied with posting videos online and building your audience that way. When you can combine these two things together, you are building your audience from the online world and then transferring them to in-person gigs. The reality is to make any of this work, a lot of musicians need to severely change their mindset, which is why I made this video right here, giving you brutally honest advice for musicians without a gig.