September 28, 2010 The Virtual Tour, Part I (OR: How Your Band Can Tour the World from Your Living Room)
A virtual music tour is similar to a traditional tour in that the band/musicians make several appearances, and in several locations, in an attempt to promote and sell their music. On a traditional tour, musicians make contact with clubs, bars or other suitable venues (suitable venues: house parties, small music festivals, state fairs, and Geri’s Bat Mitzvah) to book live shows. They then travel to each city, spend time at each location playing their music and possibly spending time with the audience in an effort to sell their music and merchandise. Many musicians will agree, for the effort and expense involved, touring and playing live doesn’t sell many CD’s or music downloads. (Although it can be a heck of a lot of fun, if you have the money.)
A virtual tour is very similar to the traditional live tour. The biggest difference being, there are no extensive travel, no travel related expenses, no need to try to figure out how to take 2, 6, or 12 weeks off work. Virtual tours are accomplished 100 percent over the Internet.
Musicians make contact with related web sites, blog writers/editors, radio stations, to schedule one-day visits per site. An interview, a review of the bands music, or a performance video, is prepared in advance for posting on an agreed upon date. The tour stop is advertised (note: advertised on your website, the hosting site, your facebook, your myspace, your reverbnation profile, your youtube channel, your network of fellow musicians, etc.) well in advance of the posting date. The day of the post and some days after, the band/musician will usually make themselves available for comment responses in a real-time chat stream or answering viewers posted questions (within the comment link section).
Sometimes, a virtual tour will include video interviews or live performances as well. These tour stops require more precise timing, therefore are a little more difficult to schedule.
There are agencies you can hire to organize a virtual book tour for you. The cost ranges from $300 to $3,000 depending on the number of tour dates and how extravagant you want the tour to be. Cost may also increase if you want to “tour” in a country that speaks a language other than yours. Translators are not cheap, but making an effort to “meet” fans in their own language goes a long way. For comparison, contrast the cost/time involvement of a two-week “live” tour with 4-5 live venues versus the two-week “virtual” tour which has minimal travel, reasonable time needs, and could have 7-9 “online venue” appearances.
These agencies pinpoint blogs/web sites in certain areas of the country or the world, web sites with specific focus based on musical style, lifestyle of the band, or even those based on common interests between band member and audience. These online or virtual stops will introduce your music to new listeners and hopefully gain you new fans and buyers of your music.
To date, there may only be two of of these agencies in existence. More agencies will undoubtedly appear as they realize the potential in online/virtual music promotion and performance.
You do have the option of organizing your own virtual tour. The process is not as difficult as it might first appear. The most important part of a successful do-it-yourself virtual tour is having good organizational skills. The ability to politely and efficiently communicate with others is a plus as well.
Coming Soon: The Virtual Tour, Part II or How All that Internet Surfing Proves Useful.
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Apryl Peredo is the founder of Inter Idoru, a company which specializes in Virtual Tours, Virtual Promotion, and Virtual Band Management. She has several years experience in the music industry in radio production, sound engineering and production, artist/music promotion, and event planning. She can be contacted at: inter.idoru@gmail.com.
Reader Comments (6)
An online tour huh? Seems like an interesting idea. Sure, we post our music or review stuff on our various social media, but seems like an interesting and new idea to actually plan to appear on various sites on different days.
I guess you could also appear on blogs and sites written or aimed at certain geographical areas, so it would still be almost like an actual tour. Say appear on California coast sites or blogs, East coast blogs.
An online virtual tour is very new and creative in concept. The band should experiment and have fun in cyberspace as they can greatly benefit from what it has to offer by working with an experienced organization capable of planning, organizing and executing the promotional efforts for them for a smaller fee than real tours. A specialist helps by objectively evaluating the music and provides professional music matching with the right websites to maximize the band's potential. However the "analog" part of me being a former musician and spokesman of a band says there will always be a difference between actual and virtual tours, such as the rush gained only by playing music in front of a live audience. I would be interested to learn how this aspect for the player can be satisfied from virtual tours. The virtual tour from a commercial point of view however has its great benefits, from a cost performance perspective and is the best thing next to a real tour and should have a high impact or possibly even the same effect if your music is good enough to start out with.
Do you get a virtual audience with these too? Or a real one? How does one captivate an audience? For traditional tours you get them financially invested by selling them a ticket which motivates them to commit time to the show. Hey, if it works I'm all for it, less mileage on the RV.
This is very weird - I'm doing this @ the moment - playing live on ustream every week and keeping the ball rolling - its really good for building momentum and has lead to real world gigs and cd and download sales - events online get people talking - great for social media conversation starting - message me if you need any info :)
Crowfeather: I will discuss this idea more in Virtual Tour Part II; coming soon! But the jist is - a virtual tour is not really just streaming concerts. Basically you "appear" on blogs, websites - much as you could appear on a talk show, or in a CD store. You are interviewed or reviewed - and perhaps a video is embedded in the blog or web post.
This engages the new reader/listener to then go BUY (hopefully) your CD, your downloads, your t-shirts
The idea with this is - you can drive the RV all over and spend a lot of money - but if no one has heard of you, your live audience is pretty small.
If you appear on a blog, with even a small but regular readership of 300 people, that is 300 new ears. Many of them may then visit your site and buy your music.
...(Think of an author appearing in a bookstore - its a free event - the author reads a selection from their book to the people already milling around, and many of those people are then inclined to buy the book.)
It goes without saying that you need a decent website, which makes it easy for fans to buy a download or merchandise...
Matt: Good for you! I think that putting regular "lives" on line is a nice way to keep current fans happy.
Also, were you to have "appeared" on some blog, being interviewed or reviewed - you could always announce your upcoming "live online show." Get some new fans!
To all: One of the benefits of a virtual tour is this: Not all musicians want/love to play lives. They have no desire to make money being on the road! They just want to make music and hopefully sell it to appreciative fans. A virtual blog tour can gain them potential listeners that would never have been exposed to the band...
On the other hand, if you are a musician who prefers to make the money playing live shows...if you tailor your online tour to certain geographical areas, build up an online fan base, then when you organize a RL tour...announcing your performance dates on those same blogs, to those same readers/listeners - means your live show sells far more tickets than it would have with no ground work.
The virtual tour can be both THE tour aspect OR the pre-promotion aspect.