The Top 3 Videos You Need to Get Booked as an Independent Artist
If you’re an artist in the DMV, you’ve had this experience. You want to get booked for a show at a new venue, so you email the talent buyer with your music. The buyer opens your email while responding to 10 other bands, clicks whatever link you put in front of them, and gives it 10-15 seconds before deciding to give you a slot or not.
That decision is never about the song.
DMV promoters are not buying music. They want butts in seats. The reality is that they are spending real money to rent a Thursday night at a venue that has to be full enough to justify the bar spend, the sound guy, the security, and the risk of putting an unproven name on a bill. When a buyer at a venue like Union Stage, Pearl Street Warehouse, Songbyrd or the Howard Theatre clicks your link, the question in their head is this: what happens if I book this band? A Live Nation buyer filling an opening slot at a room like The Fillmore Silver Spring is asking the exact same question with even less time to answer it.
Audio doesn’t answer that question. Neither do photos. Only live performance video can.
These are the top 3 live performance videos that you need to get booked at any venue.
The top 3 videos you need to get booked, in the order a talent buyer watches them
First, you need the show highlight reel WITH crowd footage that showcases your best highlight moments in 30-45 seconds. Then you need a multi-sing promo video with LIVE audio that proves your live performance is undeniable. Finally, you need live show social media assets to give to the booking agent so they have what they need to give to the promoter to get people to come the show. Let’s cover each one in depth.
1. Show highlight reel WITH crowd footage
It’s great that you sound amazing, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t fill seats. Venues need people to show up and buy drinks and food. They are not nonprofits and nothing will get you blacklisted faster than booking a show and bringing no one. The first thing you have to do is prove to the venue that you can actually bring people out. That’s what this video is for.
The show highlight reel showcases your magic moments, how many people came, expresses the excitement of your show, and communicates the emotional feeling of what it’s like to be there. It has a TON of crowd shots of people enjoying themselves with friends, drinking, and spending money.
Venues will not book you if they don’t think they will make money, and they make their money at the bar. If you can’t show that you can bring people, you won’t get booked.
Most artists just send footage that is entirely tight shots of themselves or just the stage and wonder why venues don’t respond. A buyer watching thirty seconds of your face learns nothing they did not already know from your photos. Thirty seconds of a room reacting to you tells them exactly what they are buying.
Understand that the buyer is also checking this against data, not just vibes. Bandsintown gives them your tracker count broken out by metro, so they can see how many people in the Washington and Baltimore area have actually signed up to hear when you play. Sometimes they actually reach out to other local venues to see how many tickets you actually sold. Don’t believe me? Ask the venues you know. They all know each other, and they talk.
If your crowd is small right now, shoot it anyway, shoot it tight, and shoot it from an angle where twenty engaged people read as twenty engaged people rather than an empty room with twenty people in it. Nobody is expecting an arena. They just need something to go off of to know your fans will come out.
2. Multi-song promo video with LIVE audio
Once you’ve shown you can draw and have an exciting show, you now need to prove that you can actually perform a killer show. This is the video that separates artists who deserve these opportunities from artists who just look good in a two second edit.
Before, you could send out a music video and you might get some shows. That was before auto-tune and videos that looked real but weren’t. Venues got hip to this and are REALLY good at figuring out when your video is a cool video synced up to pre-recorded studio audio. This is because they have all been burned before where they booked someone whose video looked and sounded awesome but then they couldn’t sing or connect with the crowd and had ZERO energy.
What you need is longer sections of actual live performance with no autotune and a single unbroken video angle. Multiple camera angles don’t really help here and are a waste of your budget (unless you have tons of money then they’re fun and dope to have but they don’t make a difference here for results). This video should be a promo video with 5-6 thirty second clips of different songs edited together into a 3 minute promo video, all performed live, ideally with a few small flaws in them. Don’t over tune your vocals or resing them later in studio. Don’t replace the guitar audio. This needs to be exactly what you sound like live. What you SHOULD do is multi-track the audio from your show and send it to a pro mixing engineer who will make you sound your best, then sync that up to the video. If you don’t have the budget for that, get a board feed and blend it with the camera audio or a zoom recorder in the back of the room.
3. Live show social media assets
We all know the bands that complain about venues and agents not helping promote the show. It’s a problem, we all know it. But have you thought about what it’s like for them? They don’t know you from Adam and all they typically get from artists is a few photos and a quick bio. Do you expect them to invite their friends and family to every show? How exactly are they convincing people to come and how do they reach those people? While some venues have email lists and do personal promo, they can’t possibly hype up every single show to their friends and family and community and get you featured in news articles (just like you can’t). Should they have a better solution that making a basic poster and sharing it on social media announcing the show? Yes. Will they figure out an effective way to promote your show anytime soon? Probably not. What they CAN do is post to social media with killer assets that YOU give them.
Now, what actually makes people pay attention on social media and come out to shows?
It’s MOMENTS.
Think about your favorite moments at concerts you’ve been too. Maybe it was an insane guitar solo. A synchronized band move or intimate and emotional song with solo piano and vocals. Crazy visuals that somehow synced to all the drum hits. The lead singer crowd surfing in a blow up pirate ship (yes this really happened, look it up it’s awesome).
Most artists don’t think about this. They think if they just play good sounding music on stage that a clip of that should do well on social media.
But that’s not how it works. You’re competing against all of the other attention grabbing content online and need to stand out. Do something unusual. Get a huge blow up ducky and have it crowd surf. Give everyone bracelets that are synced up to your show with ableton (this isn’t hard, look up the facebook group). Get everyone’s hands in the air. Sing to a fan. Film all of these moments and send 10-20 of your best clips to the promoter for them to use to share on their social media as add you as a collaborator. These clips will attract attention and help sell tickets, making their job easy, which is exactly what you want.
Obviously make sure you have good audio for these clips and shoot in vertical.
On DICE, where a lot of independent rooms in this region sell, the event listing is where a casual browser decides whether to buy, and video on that listing does the convincing that a flyer cannot. Handing the promoter clean vertical video assets the day the show is announced makes you the easiest artist on the bill to market, and promoters remember which artists helped them sell tickets.
Have these ready to go in a public Google drive folder. Make sure these are clips from recent shows. Add the videographer’s IG username in every file name in the drive so they know who to credit.
Put your highlight reel and multi-song promo video under the single link in your booking email. Your social media assets in the Google drive go to the promoter the day the show is announced, onto the DICE event listing, and out on your own channels.
What NOT to do
Every buyer in this region has their list of red flags they look for. Footage shot from the back of the room on an iPhone lit entirely in red or purple light so nothing is legible with bad audio so the low end swallows the vocal. Links that aren’t public and they have to request access to. If a buyer has to make an account to watch or listen to your stuff, they won’t.
If you don’t have these videos yet
Most independent artists in DC, Maryland, and Virginia reading this don’t have these together. There are two ways to solve this.
The first is to treat your next show (even a small one) as a shoot. Bring cameras, get a board feed, and accept that a room of forty people filmed with pro video and audio outperforms a room of four hundred filmed badly.
The second is to record the set in a controlled room instead of waiting on a show. A live studio session will deliver the multi-angle promo video in a single afternoon with studio quality audio that is LIVE. Then you just need to film a show to get the show highlight reel and live show social media assets. Many artists in this market now film their live show in a studio setting first and shoot a show soon after. You don’t have to have everything at once, but to put your best foot forward you should work toward all three.
Let’s sum this up
Talent buyers are not gatekeeping for the sake of it. They are managing risk with limited information, and real video of you performing is the best proof you can give them of what they’re going to get when they book you. If you send them these three video assets, that tells them you’re a pro. If you send them a streaming link and a photo, it won’t.
The gap between those two is not talent. In this market it almost never is. It’s about whether somebody was rolling video.
LJR Creative produces cinematic live video for musicians, festivals and events across DC, Maryland and Virginia. See more of our work on our homepage.
