I’ve moved!

Romey

I just wanted to announce that I’ve moved… my blog to a new URL.

Back in the early 2000’s I adopted an internet handle “RomeyInFC”, which stood for “Romey In Fort Collins”. I took a lot of pride in being in Fort Collins and based it off a nickname that my friends gave me. Whether you’d email me or visit different sites throughout the web, chances are you’d find me there as RomeyInFC.

The problem is that I haven’t lived in Fort Collins for the last 7 years.

Since I’ve moved to Windsor, I’ve shifted away from using RomeyInFC. If I managed to claim “jeromey” from a few major places, like Twitter and Facebook, but in other places where I couldn’t I became “BalderRomey”. In one of the final steps of transitioning to that username, I decided to cash in on any Google Juice SEO that my site has acquired, and shift it all over to BalderRomey.com

So welcome to my new home on the web, it looks a lot like my old home. As I’ve been blogging for nearly 14 years, I appreciate those who have popped in over the course of my posts, and hope to entertain those as I continue to write.

Photographing Cosmic Hot Sauce and My Dog Ate Chad

Photographing Cosmic Hot Sauce and My Dog Ate Chad

Romey

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been out to shoot some bands, but I recently had the opportunity to catch some talented high school bands at the Downtown Artery in Fort Collins.

Cosmic Hot Sauce opened for My Dog Ate Chad, both which put on an awesome show for a packed crowd. It was a bit of the challenge to work on the extreme amount of red light that was being cast on faces, but I captured some pretty fun shots.

Congrats to both bands for some awesome shows! They’re both playing at FoCoMX in April: Cosmic Hot Sauce at Scrumpy’s on Saturday at 6:45pm, My Dog Ate Chad at the Aggie on Friday at 5:30pm

Band Booking – how to contact a venue

Band Booking – how to contact a venue

Romey

Booking gigs can be one of the most daunting tasks for your band, but I’ve found that once I get started with contacting a few venues and get the ball rolling, it becomes easy to build momentum.

When I first started booking for Greenfoot back in the mid-2000’s, I would often build physical press kits that included a bio sheet, photo, and CD, then hand deliver it to bars and venues. Now that I’m booking for Amy and the Peace Pipes, that technique has gone by the wayside but luckily todays requires a lot less (and cheaper) effort, as long as you’re willing to stay on top of follow-ups.

Here are some of the booking scripts that I use. I’ve tended to get better responses when I do two things with the emails: keep them very short and direct, frame in the context that I’m helping them fill a date. A lot of times we assume that bars and venues are giving us exclusive attention and are thoroughly listening to our demo to see if we’re a good fit, but the reality is that they’re just quickly trying to fill dates before they can move onto the other 50 things they need to do to run their business.

One last note: none of these ideas are particularly my own or original, but are a conglomerate of many articles and techniques I’ve read at some great DIY musician blogs, like DIY Musician Blog, HypeBot, and Music Think Tank to name a few.

Prework

  • Make sure you have a website that includes all the basics about your band but specifically has direct access to your music/videos. The more professional your site, the better, but make sure you have an attractive homepage (with a great professional picture of your band) that is intuitive for a booking manager to hear what you sound like.
  • Go to the venue’s web site and try to find the email address for the booking manager/coordinator. If they don’t make that clear, you can use the general email address. If all else fails, contact them through Facebook Messenger, but you just change your email a bit. I’ll give two templates below.
  • Come up with a 1-sentence “elevator pitch” about your band. It doesn’t have to change the world, but it does need to describe you’re niche (for Amy and the Peace Pipes I say, “We’re a woman-fronted piano rock band out of Fort Collins.”
  • If they have a calendar, go double check your wanted to date to see if it’s open, and better yet if you’re planning 2-3 months ahead and the calendar happens to look blank, they may have more openings and be more apt to give you the date that you requested. Also check to see if there’s a pattern for dates they have live music (whether they typically have them on a Friday or Saturday, or if there’s a specific night of the week)
  • Pick 1-4 dates that you would like to request. I typically give them 3. Don’t be afraid to ask for the ideal date, but also give them some options as well (e.g. if they book music on Thursday, Fridays or Saturdays, ask for 2 Saturdays then throw in a Thursday).

Sending the email

Subject: Booking Inquiry: Amy and the Peace Pipes for <Month Name>

If you know the name of the booking contact: 

Hi <Booking Contact>,

I hope you are doing well. I was wondering if you are actively booking bands for <Season or Month Name> at the <Venue Name>? If so, my band, <Band Name>, would love to help you out. We're a <1 sentence "elevator pitch" description about your band>. 

Could we help you fill any of the following dates: 
- <Date Option 1>
- <Date Option 2>
- <Date Option 3>

If you have another date where you'd need some help, just let us know. 

Thanks,
<Your Name> from <Your Band Name>
<Your Band's Web Site>

If you don’t know the name of the booking contact, I include all of the information in there as there’s a good chance they’ll just forward this email to the booking manager:

Hi <Venue Name>,

 Could you help me get in touch with the person responsible for band  bookings?  If you're looking to fill any dates this <season or  month>, my band, <Band Name> would be a great fit. We're a <1 sentence "elevator pitch" description about your band>. 

Could we help you fill any of the following dates: 
- <Date Option 1>
- <Date Option 2>
- <Date Option 3>

If you have another date where you'd need some help, just let us know. 

Thanks,
<Your Name> from <Your Band Name>
<Your Band's Web Site>

Email Tips

  • Adding the web site at the bottom of the page is crucial. I also always add the “from <My band name>” at the bottom too, making it easy if they end up searching their email later.
  • I typically send the emails on Tuesday through Thursday during the day. I try to avoid sending emails at night, as those will be part of the pileup they get when they come into work the next day. I want that email to come in either mid-morning or early afternoon when they’ll hopefully want to react to it quickly and get it out of their inbox. I stay away from weekends (when they’re busy doing bar/venue stuff, and Sundays and Mondays are likely the days off for most of them).
  • I’ll still work on them the night before and write the email, just store it in my drafts, then go in and just send the email when the time is right

The Most Important Step: Following Up

Chances are you won’t hear back from that original message. Venues tend to get a lot of emails from various vendors and often will treat your original email like spam or white noise. After sending the message, I’ll go snooze the message in Gmail (if you use Gmail, this is an awesome tool for reminders and follow-ups) from 7-9 days later, then when it pops up, I send a quick follow-up email:

Hi <Booking Agent Name>,

I just wanted to follow up on my email from last week, wondering if we can help you fill any of the following dates: 
- <Date Option 1>
- <Date Option 2>
- <Date Option 3>
Please let us know if we can be of any help. Thanks so much!

-<Your Name> from <Your Band Name>
<Band Web Site Address>

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a response, but I often follow up 1-2 more times, again 7-9 days apart. I’ve never had anyone yell at me for spamming them, sometimes you’ll get the “thanks, but no thanks”, but at least you got a response.

I’ve had a lot of success with this technique, but the key is staying on top of your follow-ups. If you don’t get the answer you want, remain respectful and offer to help them in pinch. You’re trying to help venue owners and booking managers realize that you’re eager to partner with them to make everyone successful. I’d love to hear booking tips others may have.

How to fix Twitter

Romey

Over the last 15 years, my affinity for social networks have come and gone, but Twitter has remained largely constant and for the most part, beneficial.  That said, Twitter has some serious wounds that they have yet to address after all of this time.  Twitter does have a tendency to get toxic in its discourse and does seem to often devolve to trolling and harassment.  While Twitter has paid lip service on fixing the issue, boasting about their improved capabilities in reporting and responding to abuse, it doesn’t seem like Twitter has the wherewithal to take the issue head-on.

Twitter’s problem: the blue checkmark

I remember when Twitter started to gain traction beyond the tech community, and you would start to see actual bonafide celebrities gain a massive amount of Twitter followers. Given the skepticism of the platform and its stage of growth, it made perfect sense for Twitter to institute a “verified” certification to help followers distinguish between a real person from a fake or parody account.  However, that blue checkmark has morphed into a validity tracker, a sign of whether someone has “made it” in the zeitgeist of popular culture.

By being secretive about how and which Twitter users get verified, Twitter has enabled the checkmark to become a status symbol, and a clear way of distinguishing who Twitter deems an influencer on their platform. This has resulted in the public developing a belief that verification is a defacto Twitter endorsement of that user on their platform. You see this play out when a celebrity or influencer causes controversy, which is met with an outcry that their verification status should be taken away.

Twitter needs to get back to the basics and impose the original intention of its blue check mark – that the Twitter user is in fact who they claim to be. This is the root of how to fix Twitter.

Step 1: Enable any user to get a blue checkmark

Rather than reserve it for the elite amongst our population, verification should be accessible by anyone. In fact, Twitter should enable users to request verification by collecting a modest fee – say $10-15 – to cover the costs of validating a users identity. As a user who is vested in the platform, I would gladly pay that amount to prove the legitimacy of my accounts identity to the world. In many ways this could enable another revenue stream for the company.

Step 2: Change the platform to ignore mentions and replies by unverified users

Twitter could then alter their interface to toggle between showing mentions/replies/interactions from unverified users. They say that on the Internet, anonymity is a hell of a drug – then enable Twitter users, from celebs to muggles, to choose whether they want to remove anonymity from their engagement. People could even take it a step further and allow their Tweets only to be seen by verified users. There are benefits in Twitter providing access to anonymity (e.g. whistle-blowing, speaking out against an oppressive government), but those that are concerned about trolling and harassment can easily disengage from those that aren’t brave enough to attach their identity to their comments.

Step 3: Ban the disruptive users

I know, they already ban the trolls, especially when they cross the line. Many will turn around and create another account, but this time when they do it, they will permanently lose their access to verification. They will now be relegated to the cesspool of anonymity that can easily be turned off with a toggle of the switch.

I realize this won’t fix all of Twitter’s problems, but I do think it would go a long way of re-establishing credibility within the platform, promote civility among their users, but yet continue to enable the ability to converse, discuss and debate on this public platform.

Please, @jack and the rest of Twitter, democratize the blue checkmark. Oh, and stop being jerks to the app developers that got you where you are today.

Colorado state Democrats are destroying the Electoral College

Romey

Colorado lawmakers are sparring over a plan to bypass the Electoral College. Here’s what’s at stake.

I don’t know what’s more appalling: that this is being done at the state legislature, or that no one really seems to be covering it all that much. I’m not a fan of knee-jerk, reactive legislation to begin with, but no amount of state laws that you pass will put Hillary in the White House. To make the Electoral College a petty partisan issue betrays the republic and displays a level of partisan toxicity that further erodes our societal foundation.

The irony is that proponents are pushing for making every vote count, but the reality is that laws like this will all but nullify the constituency of anyone not living in an urban setting. All you have to do is look at a population density map to see the disparity between the major cities in our country, and everywhere else.

Any area that starts to look green can simply be ignored by any presidential candidate. For every 1 person you reach in the 20-to-88 zone, you can reach 200x the amount of people by just staying in the cities. Why would you go there to campaign? What would stop a presidential candidate from pandering only to those people? Does your vote even count anymore?

Go look at this list of states by population density, and you’ll find that electoral power would be concentrated into 14 states, with Colorado falling to #21 on that list. Our ballots would now become blank checks to these populous states.

What’s worse is that voters aren’t even getting a voice. This isn’t being part of some national dialog, but rather is being rammed through, state by state, at the legislature level. If our state representatives really cared about voters rights, they’d let the voters actually make the decision.

To those who aren’t fans of President Trump (and I’m one of them), the lesson from 2016 should not be to abolish the Electoral College, but rather that we should avoid elevating the office of the Presidency as a de-facto king of our country. Rather than using our state legislatures to cry “sour grapes”, we should be pushing for our national legislatures to take back their constitutional power. Instead, we seem content to do irreperable harm to our state and country.