Announcing gigs on social media for individual musicians

It's interesting to figure out how to announce gigs and get people to come out to my shows. Lately, I've been using ArtistData as an enter-once/broadcast-to-many way of getting my gigs onto various event calendars, and to publish those shows to Facebook and other social media. I've found that it's really efficient at doing that, and really handy. One thing that can kind of a drag about having all of these ways to publish shows is that you could spend hours logging onto different sites and creating the same event for each one. ArtistData alleviates that problem well - create the event there, and you can automatically publish it to Facebook, Twitter, local event calendars like AllAboutJazz, my own website calendar, and on the ArtistData site itself. Very cool!

One thing is missing for me, though. I am an individual musician who is involved in multiple music projects, and I freelance, as well. I am fortunate enough to have plenty of friends who are interested in hearing me play in these different groups, which is really great! So, I want to let them know about everything I'm doing, whether I'm leading the group or not. In many cases, I'm playing as a member of another group, and not the leader of the "John Patrick Douglas Band". The trouble is that sites like ArtistData and ReverbNation are not set up for musicians who are part of other projects to announce their shows. They're really set up for bands, and individual headlining musicians, like singer/songwriters who perform by themselves.

I don't want to create confusion. I just saw on AllAboutJazz that "John Patrick Douglas" is playing a show in May. It's great - ArtistData very efficiently published the show to AllAboutJazz's calendar. The problem is that the show isn't mine - it's for Mondo Loko, the super-fun Samba Rock band that I'm a part of. I have friends who know me, but perhaps haven't had a chance to check out Mondo Loko yet, who might go to that show because I said I'm playing in it. I don't want to misrepresent, though - Mondo Loko got the gig, and it's their name on the marquee this time, not mine.

When I create these events, I say in the desciption "w/so-and-so" or "as a member of so-and-so", but that isn't what appears in the headline. So, on AllAboutJazz it looks like it's my gig. I'd like it if there was an option (like a checkbox) to indicate "as a member of", then a field or dropdown where you could indicate whom the group is that I'm playing with. I looked for a way on ArtistData's website to suggest this to them, but I didn't find a way to submit a product suggestion. I had tried the same thing with ReverbNation before, and got a response like, "We don't have that feature at this time". No kidding. That's why I'm suggesting it!

So, I guess that I'll have to just make it clear on my website, and on individual social media posts what the context is when I announce a show. Hopefully there will be a better, more flexible way to do this in the future.