Booking Your First Show as a Promoter: A Checklist

Promoting a show is booking a room, filling a bill, selling tickets and settling up. Each part is simple; the failure is almost always sequencing — booking bands before you understand the venue deal, or promoting before there's anything to promote.

Eight to twelve weeks out: the room

Pick a room smaller than you think. A hundred people in a 120-cap room is a great night. A hundred people in a 400-cap room is a bad one, and they're the same hundred people.

Get the venue deal in writing before you speak to bands:

• Hire fee, or the bar-deal terms.

• What's included: PA, engineer, lights, door staff.

• Capacity and curfew.

• Who keeps the bar, and whether there's a minimum.

• Merch cut, if any.

You cannot make a sensible offer to a band until you know these, which is why booking bands first is the classic first-timer mistake.

Six to ten weeks out: the bill

Three acts. Match the draw without stacking the same audience, and make sure at least one has a genuine local following. See building a bill and how to tell if a band will draw.

Send a one-page agreement to each act as they confirm — fee, times, set length, guest list, cancellation. Not a contract to intimidate anyone; a shared record so nobody's guessing in September.

Six weeks out: the numbers

Before you announce, know your break-even: fixed costs, ticket price, and how many you need through the door. If break-even is 80% of capacity, the show is badly structured and you should fix it now — lower the guarantee, cut a cost, or raise the price — rather than discovering it at settlement.

Four to six weeks out: announce

• Artwork, ticket link, event page live on the same day.

• Every band posts on announcement day. Put this in the agreement or at least the email. A staggered announcement where one band posts three weeks later wastes the moment.

• Local listings, radio, and any scene newsletter.

Two weeks out: the push

This is when tickets actually move. Content with substance — a track, a video, something to share rather than another poster. Bands post again. Any paid promotion runs now, targeted locally and tightly.

If sales are dead at two weeks, act rather than hope: paper the room with comps to people who'll bring energy and buy drinks, add a local act with a draw, or accept a smaller night and cut costs where you still can.

Show week

• Confirm times with every band and the venue, in writing, again.

• Confirm the engineer.

• Guest lists finalised the day before with a stated deadline.

• Float for the door, and change.

• Someone other than you on the door, briefed in writing.

On the night

Run to time. Late changeovers cost you the last thirty minutes of bar take and the audience's patience. Settle in the open with a printed sheet, pay people that night if you can, and thank the door staff and engineer specifically — you'll want them next time.

After

Write down what actually happened while it's fresh: attendance, walk-ups versus advance, what each band drew, what the night cost, what you'd change. Your second show is only better than your first if this exists.

Musavise's gig tracker holds the whole show in one place — the deal, the advancing checklist, times, day-of contacts, costs, ticket counts and a printable settlement sheet — so the record of what happened is a byproduct of running the night rather than a thing you mean to write up later.

All of it lives in one free Musavise account — free means free, within honest limits, and your data exports whenever you want it. Create your free account; it takes about two minutes.