If you’re going to be at SXSW and have a music badge swing by our panel “Friendbases to Fanbases: Why you must tour now!” on Thursday, March 18th on 12:30 in Room 13B.
We’ve got a sweet line-up of panelists: Tom Windish, owner of The Windish Agency, Marc Allen of Red Light Management, Seth Hubbard of Polyvinyl Records and Matt Hickey of High Road Touring.
If you want to tour, don’t miss this panel. We’re going to talk some serious shop! Details here…
Bands! Soon you will be able to take credit cards via your smart phone! This is kind of huge if you’re looking to squeeze out some extra cash via the merch table.
How? A start-up called Square created a super simple solution the plugs into a phone’s headphone jack. It is still invite-only but you can follow them to keep up for when it goes public. Watch the video for a demo.
Hey BTTV’ers new and old!
It’s time for a crash course on how to get the most out of BTTV by hosting bands and/or getting out on tour.
Fill Out Your BTTV Profile COMPLETELY!
This is important for both Bands and Hosts. Provide as munch info as you can. Everyone needs to be able to find a little background info on each other by looking at a full profile and checking out your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or your band’s website.
There’s a big trust factor going on with BTTV, so everyone needs to chip in.
Get Local: Ask questions…
Through BTTV you can gather a ton local info that you wouldn’t get without using the site. Use this to your advantage.
Reach out to people in other cities. They may not be able to host you, but they may know a bunch about their city and music scene. Ask questions, see who knows who, find out who books what and you might just end up playing a great show to a large crowd and sell a bunch of merch that you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Grow Your Fanbase Through True Human Interaction
Touring and touring smart is great way to grow a sustainable fan base that will show up the next time you come to town. Hit the road and save money any way you can. Also use tools that are out there (Bandize, Topspin and Band Metrics) to do more with less. BTTV is just one piece in the cheap touring puzzle.
Share BTTV With Your Friends
The more people who are signed up, the better the BTTV is for everyone.
Tell your friends. Tweet about us. Become a Facebook Fan or join our Street Team and get free stuff!
Wow! What a fun day. BTTV made it on to the SXSW homepage. It may not be up there for long so we’ve got a pic below. That’s Todd’s mug lookin’ at ya.
To make things even more crazy our panel got picked via the SXSW Panel Picker. What? Whoa! It’s called “Friend-bases to Fan-bases: Why you must tour now”. We’ll have more details on that in the coming weeks.
Hey. We’ve been a little lazy with the bloggity-blog but this dandy just came through. We Are Austin did a little piece on us, it aired last weekend and the sucker is up on the YouTube.
Thrilled we are to have A Life of Science tweet their tour for us while they man handle the mid-west and east coast. You can catch them at a bevy of venues and Comic Con in Ohio and NYC! These kids get the internets, yes they do.
Check out their BTTV Tour Diary.
Check out their own Video Blog or “Vlog” or V-Blogg-o-roo
Now go check them out…
It looks like it’s two for ones today! We had a great interview with the ABJ yesterday and they ran the story today. Whoa…check it out.
Also, if you live in Austin set your TIVO for early. The Fox 7 Morning Show is going to run a quick story about Better Than The Van. We’ll have video of it once it’s aired.
Man, it’s hot out already….
Check out this post from Hypebot. It’s a survey from ReverbNation that looks at how these hard times are effecting bands. An interesting stat is that 47% of the bands surveyed said they were unable to go on tour because of the economy. There’s a ton of other great info and even some flashy graphs. Oooooooo.
