Alan Rowoth
You can email me at alan@alanrowoth.com
The FolkVenu list is an online discussion group of venue operators that share tips and tricks. Performers also post coming tour itineraries to the list in order to fill routing slots in their tours.
Folk_music is a moderated listener-oriented list that shines on a spotlight on the best of what's happening in the world of singer songwriters. No resource is more useful for finding out about the Next Big Thing before it becomes the next big thing.
Musi-Cal is the non-genre-specific online concert calendar. Most useful for promoting your shows, it is also a handy tool for booking and conflict management. Musi-Cal allows you to crosslink venue and artist homepages to the concert dates, so that potential attendees can look at pictures and hear sound bytes of the acts before they decide if they are going to attend. Musi-Cal allows searching and sorting by geography, genre, or artist name.
Scott Russell's Folk Venue database lists over 4000 acoustic music venues in North America. Check or add the listing for your venue so that listeners and business people can find you more easily.
The FolkDJ-L list provides support for Music Deejays, as well as sharing playlists from around the country, so that you know whose music is getting played.
The Internet is loaded with artist-specific mailing lists for performers like Ani DiFranco, Dar Williams, Ellis Paul, The Indigo Girls, James Taylor, John Hiatt, and hundreds of others. Visit Myra K. Wong's List of Musical Mailing Lists for the most comprehensive list around.
You can create the electronic equivalent of conventional mailing lists to publicize and build interest in your events. Alumni programs will find this the most cost effective and convenient way to maintain a connection with students who have moved on. Here's a look at how Cornell University serves this constituency.
Your own World Wide Web page can provide links to your resources and serve as a 24 hour receptionist to answer all your most frequently asked questions. Links to hundreds of search engines allow millions of people access to the materials that you provide.
The internet has links to any kind of information you can imagine. Instant online access to experts on production, publicity, performance... whatever you can imagine. Writing web pages is not just for gurus though. Anyone with a little patience can figure this out. It requires no special equipment or software, just modest computer experience and a little perseverence. For tons of info on the WWW and creating pages, set your browser to http://www.boutell.com/faq/
Here's a bonus for those of you who made it this far, the online version of Michael Cooneys Tips for Presenters. The most current version of these tips can always be found at http://www.alanrowoth.com/ProductionTips.html
This document created on Oct 24, 1996 by
Alan Rowoth. (315) 457-0310 ext 251
This document is © 1996 by Alan Rowoth. All rights reserved.
Please contact me if you would
like to reprint all or part of it. Feel free to liberally link and reference the URL.
The latest version is always available at http://www.alanrowoth.com/Presenters.html
Visit other handouts used at the 1996 NE Regional Folk Alliance Conference