Thanks for your comment/question! I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong with eliciting support. At some point though in the life / career of an artist you have to step up to the plate and deliver the goods. What I see a lot of is bands playing shows where their fans pay say $10 to get in, but the show they deliver isn’t worth half of that. These bands tend to operate out of a model that their fans should go see them to ‘support’ them.

That’s ok to a point, if you’re a young band just starting out and you need to learn your craft. If you intend to play with the big boys then you’ve got to deliver. You have to deliver a show that’s worth twice the cost of admission. If you can’t do that then what you need isn’t more support, but more practice, knowledge and experience. You need to commit to getting there. Otherwise you will most certainly not be successful.

The fans have to receive the value, otherwise they won’t return and you won’t be able to sustain your strategy. So support is fine, but it must be rewarded and YOU, the band/artist, have to take responsibility for delivering the reward.

As for supporting other bands, I think that brings up a good point, which I’ll probably blog about soon. Bands can and should do a lot more to help each other make money and build their fanbases. Hopefully you can find other bands out there who you get along with and enjoy playing with who can help you create a supportive community. Bands can do so much more together than they can individually. I’ll elaborate further in an upcoming blog post.

To address the issue of begging vs. selfish turds, if you keep asking other bands for support then yes, you’re begging. If you find mutually beneficial opportunities and propose them to other artists then you’re not begging. Some bands think that because they go to another band’s show that that other band should return the favor and go to their show in return. This is their idea of how support works. Really they’re just trying to obligate the other band to going to their show, which is likely how they try to get a lot of their friends/fans to go to their shows as well. This isn’t how it works.

What you want is to find other artists who naturally want to play shows with you and will otherwise show up to your shows because they actually want to! These are the kinds of people who you want to start a supporting community with. More on this soon….

Thanks for writing this. As one who has paid a lot of money for music, I can say from the b-2-b buyer’s perspective, it’s EXACTLY what a higher-up business person wants to see in a musician.