The great Seattle-based songwriter, Jim Page, was coming to the east coast back in the mid-1990's. I was living in Boston then, and offered to organize a gig. I was already well into my twenties, but I had never done such a thing before.
Jim was and is fairly well-known in Ireland, with one of Ireland's most revered musicians, Christy Moore, having recorded a number of his songs, one brilliant example of which became a real anthem for anti-nuclear sentiment in Ireland, "Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Russian Roulette."
Boston had (and has) a large population of people who were born and raised in Ireland, and a much larger population of people of Irish descent. I figured we couldn't count on the latter group, necessarily, but the actual born-and-raised-in-Ireland Irish population might have heard of Jim.
I got a listing in the Irish emigre newsletter that could then be found at all the many Irish pubs in the Boston area.
Jim was and is known to many on the west coast in certain circles, but to the extent that people in the rest of the country might have heard of him, if it wasn't related to Christy Moore, it would likely be related to imprisoned American Indian Movement activist, Leonard Peltier.
A Leonard Peltier support committee recording had gotten around on the American left pretty extensively, and it had Jim's brilliant "Song for Leonard Peltier" on it.
So along with getting the listing in the Irish paper, I called the phone number of American Indians of New England, and let whoever it was who answered the phone know that Jim was playing at an Irish pub in town.
I made a few other promotional efforts as well. The few people that did show up, other than me and Jim's girlfriend, were from that phone call I made to the American Indian group.
I was crushed at the lack of attendance, and learned a lot from the experience. I have since gotten much better at organizing events. I'll readily admit that most of what I've learned about it has come from watching other people do it over many decades of doing gigs for large, medium, and many small audiences myself, but I've also been involved with organizing well-attended events as well, since Jim's gig in the Irish pub in Boston.
I guess the most fundamental thing that I didn't understand back then, but have learned since, is that the fact that this guy, Jim Page, was well-known enough that someone on the other side of the country was fanatical about his music, was all the help I was going to get or should be able to expect, as far as Jim's fame went, in helping me promote this gig. It was impressive enough that his music had gotten out there, with no help from the corporate gatekeepers of the music industry, to the extent that I had heard of the guy at all. The rest was up to me.
In the modern era in particular it's becoming more common for me that in some corners of society, people think I'm famous, because they and some of their friends listen to my music, and they assume that probably means if they host a gig in their town, I'll be able to generate an audience through my own publicity efforts. Sometimes people make what seem like very understandable assumptions, that a guy who has over a million songs streamed in a given year might be able to get a few dozen people coming to a show in a city in which some of those million songs have been streamed recently.
This is not how it works, however. From here on in I'll get into this in detail -- what works and what doesn't, and why, from my observation.
In the US, it's commonplace, in my experience, especially in the past decade or more, for audience sizes to be in the low double digits. Everywhere else, it's commonplace that they are closer to and often well into triple digits. The reasons for this huge contrast are many. The size of my following may vary from country to country. How much free time and disposable income people have to go out to concerts definitely varies from country to country. The biggest source of variation in these audience numbers, though, is probably down to how many people are involved with promoting the gig, how they're going about doing it, and how deep their local social network is.
For an artist like me, in the top 4% of Spotify's rankings, a million songs streamed a year translates locally in a given city to me maybe having 200 people on Spotify listening to my music regularly. Of those 200, probably only a handful at most are on my email list. Possibly a few more are following me on a platform where they might hear about a gig if there's one happening in their area, such as Songkick or Bandsintown. A few others are following me on social media, but because of the algorithms and other factors, they're very unlikely to see a post on social media about a local gig, but let's say social media posts bring in another three or four people.
This means that the other 190 people in this hypothetical city who are my regular listeners on Spotify will not hear about the gig happening in their town, unless by some other means.
Those other means are the efforts of the local organizer of the gig. This is true not just for me, but again, for any other indy musician who is not in the top 1% of Spotify artists.
This is why I always recommend to any artists trying to launch their career, asking about how they might go about organizing a concert tour -- and it's the same for authors doing book tours, touring as a public speaker or organizer of a national protest or whatever else -- to consider the fact that unless they are much, much more famous than me -- like at least ten times as well-known, with ten times the following that I have on the various platforms -- there's no way they can self-organize a tour that will be worth doing. You simply must be working with local people who want to be the local sponsors of your visit to their town.
If you are someone who was thinking about organizing a gig for an artist like me, but now you're feeling discouraged, because you had hoped you could just find a nice local venue, let your friends know about it, and watch the ticket sales grow and the audience materialize for your benefit concert, I would emphatically ask you not to give up, but to reorient.
You should still host the concert, and you should still make it a benefit concert, but you and your local network or organization must understand that you are the primary ones responsible for generating an audience, not the artist visiting from out of town.
I'll go through some of the various means of publicizing an event. I want to be abundantly clear that my intention here is only to educate, not to shame -- if you are a person or part of an organization who organized an event where very few people showed up, please don't feel bad!
This list is sort of in order, with the most effective tools closer to the top.
Word of mouth
Word of mouth, to be clear, is when you speak to another person in person, on the phone, by video chat, or by text message. (If by text message, it's only truly word of mouth communication if you receive a response.)
When we're talking about word of mouth communication to promote an event, what this means is not just telling people you know that an event is happening, but telling them why you specifically think they would like to go to the event.
For example, when you tell people X performer is playing a gig, don't assume people will recognize the performer's name. Tell people something about the performer.
If you're promoting a gig of mine and you're talking to someone who's into history, don't assume they know I'm the guy that wrote "St. Patrick Battalion." Tell them. If you have friends who were involved with Occupy Wall Street back in the day, don't assume they know I wrote one of their main theme songs. Tell them about the song, "Occupy Wall Street (Stay Right Here)." Know anyone who went on lots of BLM marches in 2020? Share the song, "Say Their Names" with them. Know folks opposed to Israel's genocidal war-making? Tell them about my many songs on the subject. Folks you know paying too much rent? Share "Landlord" with them.
Even if they've heard some of my songs, this doesn't mean they know who wrote them, and it most certainly doesn't mean they know that the person who wrote them is playing in their town this month. In most situations where a person, network, or organization has any kind of local community, most of the people attending most of the shows you organize will not have heard the musician or speaker with whom you are organizing an event. You'll be introducing your audience to them, and then hopefully they'll all thank you for it!
Make it a benefit
If you make a concert a benefit concert for a group that has local traction, like, perhaps, the one you're trying to build, everybody wins. The way that works is simple: twice as many people will come. So even if you're sharing the proceeds 50/50 with the artist, say, it still will tend to work great for both organizer and artist, or at least it will work just as well as it would have if it had not been advertised as a fundraiser.
Want to make it an extra good fundraiser? In addition to selling tickets online and at the door, sell raffle tickets and hold a raffle during the course of the event. It's fun, it's another way to involve local community members and groups, and even to help promote local businesses who donate items or services for your raffle, while you're raising more money for the cause.
Your organization's email list
When Facebook and some other social media platforms began, they intentionally made themselves very useful, in order to wean us all off of our email lists and other means of communication. The result for our ability to communicate with each other and organize effectively has been nothing short of totally disastrous. Social media is not our friend, for the most part, but is mostly a useless time-suck and a place for arguing with bots.
Email lists, on the other hand, can still be very effective, if you still have one. If you don't, you can start one. I don't think it's at all a stretch to say that any organization that is serious about organizing and serious about growing has an email list. "Follow us on Instagram" is only a good organizing strategy if people will readily find out on Instagram how to get on your email list.
Substack is free to use, and so far very well-run. Mailchimp is very expensive, but you control it, not the corporation or their algorithms. Whatever platform you use for maintaining an email list, you need to have one.
Consider it your main way to get the word out to your network, especially when it comes to local events. If you're organizing locally and collecting local email addresses, the list you eventually will have will be invaluable -- unlike having a large following on social media, which may or may not result in anyone seeing any of your posts.
Other organizations' email lists
Aside from getting the word out on your own organization's email list, it's crucial to find co-sponsoring groups, and beseech them to announce events that they are co-sponsoring on their email lists. (In fact, if they don't want to announce the event to their email list, do not consider them a co-sponsor, because they are not!) Encourage them to announce the event with enthusiasm, using adjectives and graphics, and to communicate to their particular audience about what might interest their particular audience in coming to this gig.
Local media
It's good to get gigs listed in local print media, and especially good if the listings include a photo. What's much more effective is if they run an article, with a photo, preferably of course on the front page. Anything short of that is unlikely to generate more than an extra handful of people, but it's certainly still worth pursuing, as is local community radio play, and visits to local community radio stations. While it's most certainly true that local media is shrinking and disappearing, where it exists, it often is still a great way to communicate with local people, and still generally far more effective than platforms like Facebook or X or whatever else, which are inherently not local.
Physical publicity and announcements, targeted at local events and like-minded spaces
Whether building a group, a network, or publicizing an event, it's essential to communicate with people in your community who are already organized within other networks. Go to events in your community, hand out flyers, and talk to people. If you're organizing an event for a "protest singer" like me who has written 50 songs about the Gaza genocide, it's clearly a good idea to go to a local protest and hand out flyers about the upcoming event there, for example.
Physical publicity in the neighborhood of the event
Everyone might be online these days, but that doesn't mean they'll see any announcements about local events online. Same is true with local media -- because everyone is online these days, they also are likely not paying any attention to any local media at all. But they are walking down the sidewalk past the telephone poles, and they are going to supermarkets, local parks, and cafes.
Social media
Last and least, social media. These platforms exist for the purpose of making billionaires richer and keeping us all addicted to our phones. They are not designed for getting us off of our phones to go to local events in the physical world. They are designed to prevent people from doing this, in so many ways, actually.
But to the extent that social media is worth using at all, here again, what is at least potentially somewhat effective is targeted messages and targeted posts. Posting about the gig, with graphics, videos, and great enthusiasm, to locally-oriented groups, and getting those locally-oriented groups to post themselves to their platforms about the gig, is many, many times more effective than just posting to your various platforms and hoping for the best, which will accomplish probably nothing by itself. Facebook Event pages are worth setting up, if you use them as a tool for getting other people to invite their Facebook Friends to the thing.
If you're hosting an antiwar musician, get local antiwar groups to post about it on their social media accounts. If there are Facebook or Reddit or other groups that are just about promoting local events in your city of one sort or another, if appropriate, post to them, and get hosts of local groups and local individuals to post about the gig themselves, or to co-sponsor your posts, which is a thing on some platforms like Instagram.
Although social media is problematic and of limited utility compared to other tools, if you're going to use it, it's good to know how it works. For example, no one will see your posts on Facebook if you post a link. Facebook's algorithms will basically make that post invisible to anyone who doesn't go to your Facebook account as they would with a website, which most people rarely do. It won't come up in their feeds. If, on the other hand, you post a picture of yourself, and in the caption you mention the event you're trying to promote, some people will see that. (Whether they live anywhere nearby is another question.)
Fending off attacks from the trolls, cancellation campaigners, and bots
Oftentimes, whether you're organizing a concert for me, a speaking engagement for Medea Benjamin, or any number of other events, you will face a barrage of attacks on social media (especially on X and Reddit) from people who will accuse you and the people speaking or singing at your event all kinds of terrible things. These attacks will often mainly come in the days or even the hours just before an event is scheduled to happen.
From my experience, first of all, if you get flooded with hundreds of comments about how someone like Medea or me is an antisemite, holocaust-denier, or whatever other nonsense, they are probably coming from pro-Israel bot farms, and the people commenting are not actually people. It's still a lot of work to block and delete all of these accounts, but you can be fairly well certain that this deluge of bile in no way reflects real sentiment that is out there in human form anywhere nearby.
By the same token, regarding the attacks that will inevitably come from self-styled "antifascist" campaigners who will call people like Medea or I Nazi sympathizers, part of the new red-brown coalition, stooges of Putin, etc., etc.: while far less numerous than the pro-Israel bot farms, the disinformation coming from these cultish followers of Shane Burley and the other founders of Rose City Antifa or their German "Antideutsch" brothers-in-arms also represent a threat that is almost entirely online in nature, even in the places where this line of thinking is most prevalent, such as Portland, Oregon.
I don't want to minimize in any way how devastating it is to be targeted by trolling/cancellation campaigns, whether by self-styled "antifascists" or by Zionist bot farms.
What I can say, though, is that the reason such campaigns have such an impact on the minds of Americans, specifically, is because we pay attention to them, for some reason. Partly this is because we speak English, and in other countries where English is not the main language, they see this English-language bile on the internet and they pay it no mind. Partly it's because so many of us are on particularly toxic platforms like X and Reddit, and in most other countries I travel in, these platforms are less popular.
Partly it's because we Americans generally spend too much time online, and not nearly enough outside and in community with real human beings. There are a lot of reasons for this that I'll leave for another moment. But if you spend a lot less time online, especially on social media, and just focus mostly on direct, one-on-one, small-group, or in-person communication, you'll do better organizing, you'll be happier, and you'll find that the toxic soup everyone seems to be swimming in online can largely be left there.
The social media attackers are chronically online people who are extremely unlikely to actually come try to disrupt the gig. They don't live in your town -- that is, if they even exist in human form anywhere. The ones that are not bots are generally terrible organizers -- and you have to be a good organizer to organize a counter-protest. But if you just want to sow doubt, division, and fear online, X's algorithms will facilitate that for any troll, no organizing skills required.
In conclusion
Organizing events that bring people together to communicate in person, share music and ideas, sing together, eat and drink together, etc., are all absolutely essential tools in building any network, group, or social movement. These things must happen, and they must happen often. There is just no question at all about that.
The question is only how to make them happen in a successful, sustainable way. Organizers and groups across the US currently have a huge problem with this, for a lot of different reasons. It is no one's fault that this is the case, aside from the nefarious forces at work that have intentionally led us all astray. We have just collectively forgotten how to organize effectively, or we're scared to do so, except in little pockets of society here and there, when it comes to the United States.
But we can learn from how things are done in other countries, and sometimes in this one, and we can improve. Perhaps we can start by sharing essays [or podcasts] like this one with people we know who are trying to organize anything. There's nowhere to go but up.
Gig Organizing 101