Open Rehearsals: reinventing live music monetization

What if live shows are not the best and only way to monetize your live music skills?

By Chris RoditisMusicngear Lead Editor

Article photo - Open Rehearsals: reinventing live music monetization (band featured: Pryor Convictions @PCTheBand)

Starting out as an independent band means you have to bootstrap everything yourself, by self-funding or DIYing every step in the process. The usual answer I get when talking with new indie acts with regards to how they find the money to buy gear, studio time, Facebook ads and whatnot, is "lots of gigs and album sales". In my personal experience with my own indie band, this simply does not work so well if you are just starting out.

The reason is quite simple, you are a new band hence you have few fans to buy your album, and fewer venues will want to host your shows as often as you'd like since you will be having a small and declining turnout with each subsequent gig. In my city for example, Thessaloniki, it is the norm to do a maximum of 2 shows per year and even that has significant fan burnout, meaning someone that attends your show in April will possibly not turn up again in October. With Thessaloniki being the second largest city in Greece, you can see how that situation is not viable for new indie bands in Greece and countless other countries of similar size. Therefore lots of new bands are facing this roadblock.

We have been conditioned to think that what works for a new band in the US or the UK will also work for a new band in Greece, Belgium or Austria.

Due to the center of attention of the music industry being the US or the UK we have been conditioned to think that what works for a new band in the US or the UK will also work for a new band in Greece, Belgium or Austria. Well, it doesn’t and it is time we took a step back to rethink the whole process.

In this post series I will be detailing the efforts of my band to solve the aforementioned problem with a type of event that usually occurs many times within the week. Article photo - Open Rehearsals: reinventing live music monetizationAn event does not cause fan burnout because each time is different, an event that is valuable to experience as a fan because it gives you the opportunity to witness the authenticity up close and form strong bonds with the artist, and most importantly it can help new bands gradually build up a very loyal fanbase and simultaneously monetize it at their own pace, as fast or as slow as they like. The type of event I am talking about is nothing other than plain ol' rehearsals!

Follow MUSICnGEAR on social media to stay updated on the process, the steps, the results and most importantly the dos and don’ts of inviting your fans to your rehearsals. My objective is to document what an Open Rehearsal exactly is and distill this experiment into an easy to reproduce guide. My vision is for Open Rehearsals to be adopted as a movement by bands that are striving to make ends meet around the world, revolutionizing the most difficult part of launching a music career: the make it or break it part of just starting out. Stay tuned!

About Chris Roditis

Chris Roditis has been an active musician since 1995 in various bands and projects across a variety of genres ranging from acoustic, electronic to nu metal, british rock and trip hop. He has extensive experience as a mixing engineer and producer and has built recording studios for most of the projects he has been involved with. His passion for music steered his entrepreneurial skills into founding MusicNGear in 2012.

Contact Chris Roditis at chrisroditis@kinkl.com

About Open Rehearsals

This section of the blog chronicles our Open Rehearsal Initiative, where we invite artists and their fans to do their rehearsals in the Musicngear studio alongside their fans, as a way of building a more meaningful and firmly established artist-to-fan relationship and exploring the posibilities that this concept creates.

Are your interested in participating or have you tried an Open Rehearsal in your studio and have a story to share? Reach us through the contact form.