Haven’t read Chapter 4 yet? Do that first.
"Put us on tour!"
…They told me.
The group was a famous group that I shouldn’t say the name of. You might know them but chances are you don’t, either way better safe than sued. Anyway, this buncha weirdo fucks in Brooklyn tell me to put them on tour in Europe.
She was cooking a vegan breakfast.
I hated every morsel I choked down as my first client served me disgusting breakfast as she rolled out a map of exactly where in Germany they wanted to tour.
“In Germany we are big, BIG!”
The meeting lasted a couple hours. Mike Z, who ALWAYS told me to NEVER be late… was an hour late. By the time that crackpot arrived I had already been stuck with these bozos for like two hours.
Anyway, I just nodded and said “sure!” to everything they asked for. Then when I made it back outside I rushed to the subway to go back home to sweet ol’ Manhattan. I walked in the first cruddy glass door, through the narrow hallway, out to the courtyard with maladjusted pavers forming the obstacle course to traverse to the second cruddy door, then walked up four stories to my studio apartment and collapsed on my bed.
What now?
What now I asked myself? You know what the fuck to do! You’re gonna put those weirdos on tour! Okay. How?
How can I do a MOUNTAIN OF SHIT all by myself? Well… little did I know this was my foray into automation.
I woke up at like 5am the next morning and opened my laptop and began my Google search (or was it Yahoo?) with “German music venues.”
Then I landed on a plethora of search results all written in German. Hmm… which word means “contact”…
AH HAH!
Kontakt!
It’s the same fuckin word! I clicked that shit. A few email addresses were at the bottom, and I copied them over one by one to an excel sheet.
Fast-forward Three Weeks
After spending twenty-one days of copy and pasting, I had thousands and thousands of emails, not just in Germany, but all over. From Romania to England to Norway.
Okay. Well, how do I email these people? Just blast them?
“How to send tons of emails at once.”
Whatever, I’ll just blast it out on BCC.
But what should the email say? Gotta be something universal that any talent buyer can read. Something that will make sense in Berlin and Oslo and London.
So I put together an email that just said “Sorry for writing in English, it’s the only language I know. But I wanted to let you know that The @#$*)@(!)@# Are Going on Tour! We’d love to secure a date at your venue. Do you have any availability this summer?”
I don’t remember exactly what I wrote it was like fifteen years ago but it was something like that.
Anyway, within ONE DAY I had about a hundred replies, all with scattered availability and quote requests.
I didn’t know how much to ask for, just I told them they required 1K. Most of them replied with something along the lines of, “how about $500 vs 50% of the door?”
Then I googled that shit.
Ah hah. So whatever is more: $500 or 50% of ticket sales. I get it. I became a skilled music agent in a day and negotiated a $100K European tour spanning like ten nations.
I felt invincible.
Later on I learned that there was thing called a mail merge which would allow my to send emails one-by-one automatically. This way I didn’t have to send a blast email (not that it mattered cause you never went to spam back then–if you had an email, you could reach someone).
But I learned I could customize certain things like city and name and all that. So, I just went scouting music venues all downtown and told people that I could put them on tour in Europe. Then I used that same list of talent buyers to do a mail merge and within a year had about thirty music clients and three or four sketch comedy troupes.
All was going well until I showed the #$%*@#)($#@ the tour I put together. They were NOT happy.
Turns out $100K for a tour where I had them going from Oslo to London to Budapest to Berlin made no sense logistically.
I tried to rearrange shit the best I could but in the end, they ran out of money and I got NADA.
Oh well, now I have an automation system to put bands on tour in Europe… so, let’s see what happens.
