Please help us promote our October tour of the northeastern US!
The Ministry of Culture have a whole bunch of concerts set up throughout the northeastern US in October, and we need your help to make it a successful tour!
I’m thrilled to say that a good bunch of gigs have come together for our northeast US tour next month. All of the gigs on the graphic here are confirmed, and listed at davidrovics.com/tour.
The northeastern US is where I grew up, and where I lived for many years as an adult as well, in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Many of the people reading this message either grew up in the northeast, have lived in the northeast, or know people in big cities like New York and Boston, progressive bastions like Woodstock and Vermont, and college towns like Ithaca and New Haven.
Each of these gigs involves at least one person trying to get the word out locally about it. But in so many cases, without the active participation of the people reading this message, this will mean we sing for an audience of 5-10 people. If audience numbers are to be anywhere further into the double digits, what will make that happen is if YOU take a few minutes to communicate directly with specific individuals you know who live in the northeastern US who might be inclined to come to a show.
Kamala and I had a wonderful visit to the midwestern US recently, with some gigs very well-attended and others less so, but all lots of fun. Of course one of the goals, with most any of these tours, is to get more people to come to the shows, so we have more crowds that can be measured by the dozen, rather than the kind I can count on my fingers. Unfortunately, it’s amazing how much effort is required to make that happen.
At one of the gigs with a smaller crowd, in a beautiful part of Wisconsin further north than I had ever been in that state, a couple of the most enthusiastic audience members drove to Woodruff from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Although they were both serious fans of my music and listened to it regularly on Spotify, it only occurred to them to check on Spotify to see if I had any upcoming gigs in the area because they were at a rally in Madison, and someone gave them a flyer about the gig we were doing there.
People are chronically overwhelmed with too much information, but they’re not necessarily overwhelmed with the bits they actually want to know about. In fact, those bits seem more likely than ever to get lost. Me doing a local gig somewhere is very rarely the type of thing that’s going to go viral on social media. Even if they’re regular listeners on a music streaming platform, none of the platforms are going to let them know when I have a gig in their area, in any way that they’re likely to see. The word won’t get out like that — but the tried-and-true method of individually calling or writing your friends in a particular town and telling them about an upcoming event they’ll probably be happy to know about still works great.
So, thanks in advance so much for your support in the form of spreading the word, in whatever ways, about our October tour. That graphic up there can be downloaded and shared, by the way!
I’ll update the graphic, and my email list and such, as more gigs get confirmed — there will likely be one or two more to add, but all the ones that are confirmed so far are listed on that graphic and listed at davidrovics.com/tour.
Other tours I’m working on booking include visits to Texas and Georgia in December, California in January, and Europe in April/May.
Here’s me singing “Deport the Billionaires” at the Go for Bo congressional campaign kickoff event on 9/11 in Eugene.
PDX: vigil for Gaza every Sunday at noon at 12th and Hawthorne!
