Free concert tour to promote unkown talent

Question

Hey everybody this is my first post here and wanted to share an experiement i'm in the process of conducting to build awarness for the group i'm working with. To give you some background I am from Jamaica where there is alot of young talent and so forth the problem is there is very few avenues for promoting christian artiste and that avenue is radio. I started experiementing with the free download for an email recently and that slowly building but wanted to raise more awareness of the group. 

I decided to give in and called up the radio station to schedule some interviews for them and want to make most of it to promote our latest single and the free download. The problem is they are not doing any shows and i wanted to host a number of shows islandwide for free so i can get alot of people to turn to the venue and then sell tshirts to recoup cost and so forth. My only fear is that no one will buy anything but Jamaicans love to go the shows.

so was wondering if anybody ever tried doing a group of free shows to build awarness and grow there mailing list and facebook fan base?

Thats the groups facebook page

Answer 1

The biggest thing I've found when playing free shows is getting the band members to go out into the crowd to ask for the sale. Talk up the crowd, for sure. Make friends and connections. But ask the crowd to sign up for the email list and to buy merch. Also, be realistic that you may not recoup costs for this tour. Keep in mind that it takes a few times when playing in an area before you build up a big enough fan base to become sustainable. Otherwise, make sure to look into sponsorships. Since you're religious, see if you can play at churches and if the churches can kick in for gas money. Look into playing at youth groups. Also, see if you can sell advertising on the side of your van or trailer. Good luck!

Answer 2

As Matthew says above, it's probably unrealistic to expect to break even of a single concert. So you need to look to keep your costs down as much as possible. Look to do gigs in unusual places, don't try most of the main venues as they'll charge you a fortune and you'll be competing against established places. Try something at an unusual time and place, as a precursor (or just after) a local sports event or church festival. Find somewhere where people are going to be gathering anyway (preferably with their wallets ready) and try to build on that.