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9 Business Skills You Develop as a Club/Festival Promoter

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We will be the first one to admit it: there is a negative connotation attached to the word “promoter” when it comes to the nightlife and electronic music industry. A promoter can be a number of things, but is essentially the person behind planning, marketing and executing an event of any size, be it at a small local lounge, big city nightclub or even a festival.

The stigma attached to the job title of “promoter” is one that we feel is unfair and often overlooks the true skills and activities that a promoter does to pull off a successful event. Career Cast listed “Event Coordinator” as the 5th most stressful job of 2017, behind such industries as firefighters, police officers, enlisted military personnel and airline pilot. Whereas the first four are directly concerned with matters of life or death, an event coordinator, which essentially is the same thing as a promoter, is constantly dealing with a million moving particles at once and more often-than-not having to combine a wide array of critical skills to ensure multi-scale productions go smoothly despite the high risk of anything out of their immediate control going wrong. A promoter executing events in the nightlife industry faces these struggles constantly, and perhaps even at a higher frequency due to the nature of the events they are handling and all the elements that come into play when putting together club nights, live shows or multi-stage festival production.

6AM has been working tirelessly for almost a decade producing and promoting hundreds of events of all sorts of sizes and scope. From small intimate lounges to organizing Electric Island Festival — a festival on the island of Guam that is turning 5 years old this year— and everything in between, 6AM’s team has done it all, learning invaluable and critical skills along the way.

Being a promoter is much more than “spamming Facebook with event invites and flyers,” and has essentially become one of the self-starter entrepreneurial careers of our time. We are sharing what we have learned, and are constantly still learning, with you today, in recognition of the hard work and skills it takes to be a promoter in the electronic music industry today:

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Quick Promoter Tips on How to Sell Out Your Show

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The role of the promoter has changed over the years. That is to say that more often than not, in today’s electronic music scene, DJs and producers are finding themselves doubling up as promoters of their own parties. Starting a label may sure be a way of releasing music, but the real money is in monetizing the label brand with organized showcases and parties the same way some of the most respected imprints have been doing for years. The likes of Cadenza, mobilee, Dirtybird, Knee Deep in Sound, Suara, All Day I Dream and Diynamic are just a few examples that come to mind.

Selling out an event is always the ultimate goal for any promoter, and if you’re already selling out events the idea is to always be able to do it faster than before. There’s industry techniques and skills involved in speeding up ticket sales, especially when you’re battling with small budgets, tough competition or are an emerging brand in an already existing market.

Here are some important tools at your disposal:

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The Cityfox Experience Goes On Despite Weather and Liquor Concerns During the Brooklyn Mirage Opening

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CityFoxExperience

Photo by Amanda Kari McHugh

For underground house music in New York City and surroundings, today was lined up to be the joyous re-opening of the highly anticipated Brooklyn Mirage, welcomed with a Cityfox Experience lineup boasting Adriatique, Thugfucker, Atish, Frank & Tony, Henrik Schwarz, Matthias Meyer and Bilaliwood.

Clues that various logistics were not cooperating with the party began to surface earlier in the week. Bad weather forecast and the prospect of a rainy day at a mostly outdoor venue had began to dampen the mood. Yet, Cityfox communicated amply through their social network channels that the event was, “rain or shine,” and that, “if outside is untenable, we have an incredible indoor space called The Great Hall that can host.” They went further to specify that, “Indoor space is not crammed, is bigger than outdoors.”

This morning, hours before the event was scheduled to start, Cityfox took to Facebook with a post containing notes for the event. Suddenly the official verbiage changed slightly, the note specifically stating that “The event will be taking place outdoors: currently, there’s a tiny chance of drizzle (though forecasts are improving), and it will be a bit chilly.” They advised to dress warm and noted that to counter-act the bad weather, they had set up a coat check, “heat stations” around the outdoors dance floor and would be giving out free ponchos, hot coco, tea, with other food vendors on site. They did mention an indoor lounge in the adjoining Great Hall, yet set times posted on the note clearly pointed to an outdoor music stage with no music playing inside.

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