Touring Techno

In the 1980s, independent bands painstakingly organized tours by spending hours on phones and mailing out countless 7” vinyl demos and tapes to club owners and booking agents. Most of these demos would see only a brief glimpse of life outside their postal package before finding themselves in landfills across the country. This process was frustrating and time consuming, but it was the only way bands operating outside the scope of major labels could share their music and bridge the various innovative subterranean music scenes developing at the time.

The world became a friendlier place for independent bands with the advent of powerful personal computers in the 1990s. Pioneering indie labels of the 80s, such as Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn’s SST Records and Minor Threat frontperson Ian MacKaye’s Dischord Records, had openly shared their booking experience and contact lists with the rest of the developing independent music community and all that was needed was a more effective way for bands to share their music with venues. Personal computing power attacked this issue on two fronts; they made it possible to make high quality recordings outside of the studio and CD-Rs made it cheaper to send the media out to venues. Although the internet was already in common use during most of the 1990s, nearly all venue owners demanded a physical copy of a band’s music before they would consider booking them. This is where the CD-R was incredibly handy. The CD-R format (originally called CD-WO), developed by Philips and Sony, is highly compatible with standard Audio CD players and was infinitely useful in making smaller quantities of demos. In the past, it would have been considered foolish bothering to make a pressing of under 200 copies of a demo but now it was completely feasible on a low budget.

With the passing of yet another decade, a new paradigm for tour booking has taken hold. By many inhabitants of the 90s, social networking sites were commonly seen as oasises for geeky, middle-aged men to try to get dates. In the present, nearly everyone and their local mall Santa Claus has a MySpace or Facebook account. Venue owners have opted to save a few plastic trees by favoring the use of such sites to listen to bands before booking them. Today, musicians will often wait a mere day or two for an approval or rejection email from a venue instead of taking endless trips to the post office and shipping packages and finally waiting for the booker to feel like making a phone call.

The use of social networking sites does not stop after a show is booked; bands and venue owners alike continue to use the sites to alert potential fans and showgoers of happenings in their areas. On MySpace, people often make bulletins alerting their friends of shows. Bands create profiles sharing their songs, photos, and tour dates with fans. When a band is about to tour into town, the show will appear on the local event page for area codes nearby the venue. The events page can be difficult to use for finding worthwhile shows due to the vast number of musical events happening at any time. But, with a little bit of searching, MySpace can be a useful tool for connecting musicians with music fans. Facebook is a superior environment for communicating with friends, especially in college settings. Unfortunately, they have yet to extend welcoming arms to bands and venues. Facebook events are useful for promoting shows but the network is not yet conducive to connecting promoters and bands.

In decades to come, we will see a further shift to the digital realm in the organization of tours. Great database websites like Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life currently exist to allow a route of finding promoters in distant cities that does not include the hassle of searching through pages and pages of dreadful bands on social networking sites. However, it is going to be a true music-oriented social networking site with tools for contacting appropriate venues and finding touring acts that will connect independent bands and venues in the future.