How to host live music
Hosting live music needs some planning in advance, for a restaurant or bar it can mean repeating customers, higher revenues, gaining publicity and much more but it’s not without challenges.
Promotions
Musicians need an audience and playing live music needs a good amount of promotions to attract crowd. In the age of social media and digital advertising traditional promoters fail to deliver results.
Restaurants and bars have been playing live music for a long time, because of the difficulties associated with hiring different musicians venues choose resident musicians. Drawing crowd with live music needs a healthy amount of promotion. As traditional promoters and bars and restaurants do not have the technical ability to promote they have to depend on a marketing company, which becomes very expensive.
With Creative Xchange promotions become a breeze, every event of Creative Xchange comes with flyers, social media events and promotion by musician, Creative Xchange and event manager which draws crowd to venues hosting live music. When a venue actively plays live music and does a lot of events Creative Xchange does video promotions and actively helps venues draw more and more crowd and become known as a music venue.
Visitors to Creative Xchange website see the events near them first which makes promotions relevant, targeted and helps you to reach out to your customers near you.
Licensing
Licensing is the first thing to consider, say you are playing a personal spotify playlist in a bar or restaurant it is not allowed, performing rights organizations (PRO’s) reserve the right to charge a fee for any copyrighted music played in a public place and pay the artists who have copyright for the music.
Who is PRO and how much will you pay?
There are four organizations who have licenses on music they are BMI, SESAC, GMR, and ASCAP. Some of the bars and restaurants pay all the four but some pay a minimum of 2 or even one. BMI licensing starts at 370 USD per year whereas ASCAP starts at 2 USD per day.
There are some technicalities like square foot of establishment, number of speakers etc. and you can take a look at the link for more details.
Live music and what you have to watch out for
When a local band plays covers in your establishment you have to be licensed by one of the PRO’s. Here are some tips to be covered from a lawsuit:
- Stick to original content (if you do not want to pay PRO’s but this is hard)
- Pay a PRO if your bands playing cover music
- DJ’s are not an exception if they are playing cover music
- Karaoke is not an exception
Few resources:
https://www.ascap.com/help/ascap-licensing
Equipments
Audio equipments are an essential part of any live performance, some of the venues, which have been playing live music over time have necessary equipments for a band to perform.
When a venue is starting out with live music the essential set of audio equipments include Amp, microphones and basic setup to plugin equipment which band has. Creative Xchange helps venues improve over time to get better with their audio setup so that they can host bigger bands.
The answer to not having any instrument can be to start off with solo acts like singer/songwriter and then as you build up your equipments get bands for performance. Not having the essential instruments like Amp or microphones can increase the price of booking as musician has to get the necessary equipments and transport can cost quite a bit.
