Special guest blog by DannyC, South Louisiana, USA

Larger audiences . . . am I doing my share to “Put Butts In Da Seats?”

I ask this question as while StreetJelly is no doubt a wonderful site for musicians and songwriters to showcase their talent the fact remains for ultimate success, for performers anyway, we as a group must do all we can to boost the “civilian members” of our audiences. This is of prime importance if indeed you truly want to get compensated i.e. tips from your performances.

For you “true” buskers out there, I’d be willing to bet when you stake out a setup location you are looking for the highest traffic and target music demographic audience you can reach. Well on SJ while we have a built in audience, they are like family, and while I love my “real” family as much as the next guy they are the last group I would ever expect to support my living, especially as a musician. With this said, if we want to grow our tips and audience size we simply must get more music fans to visit SJ.

As a group we can instantly start bringing in more audience members. Look, we all have email accounts, 99% of us have FB pages or websites. I urge you to take a little time, say once a month or so to do some blitz emails campaigns, FB sharing promotions and website links and yes “blatantly plug” your future performances. It’s numbers game guys, the more we “all” tell the story to our contacts and get them to tell it to their contacts the larger the “civilian” audiences will be. And every new music lover we drive to our performance will eventually check out other performers. In fact I encourage you to point out the diversity of music they can hear on SJ in your campaigns. I learned long ago you only gain by plugging other acts as you highlight yours.

Frankie and Martina have a wonderful website built with the musician and music lover in mind, and I like many of you are very thankful for the platform they have given us to showcase our music. But, IMHO, the time has come for “us” to do something to grow SJ. We as musicians just can’t sit back, plug in and expect for our popularity and tips to grow. We owe it to ourselves to do something with this platform they have afforded us to insure it does, as the saying goes the ball is in our courts.

Bottom-line . . . How often do we hear lines like, man we can’t get squat for a 3 hour gig in my town, and the next thing you learn is that very often some cat is playing a gig for “nadda” just so he/she can get “the exposure”. Well we can’t do much about that but we do have the ability and means to help build our SJ “civilian” audiences. My bet is that not only will your tips increase but the more local audience members you bring in the more audience members you will have supporting you in your live events around your town . . . therefore your number of live paid gigs should also increase.

Fellow SJ family members please take this for what it is and no more, a personal opinion offered with the hope that if some of you agree you will get on board with trying to build civilian audiences. Either way, I thank you for your time to read it.

Now let’s count off the next tune 1 ana 2 ana 3 . . .

Best Regards,

Danny C.