Weekly Report 17 ~ 'Life In The Fast Lane'

Weekly Report 17 ~ "Life In The Fast Lane"

This past week of ISM has been really busy. I have been finalizing everything for my original work and gathering everything together that I need for the showcase tomorrow. To end my week, I had one of the best and longest mentor visits downtown at Granada’s office today. I was able to create the marketing plan for the new show coming in the spring, learn how to successfully boost a Facebook post, and sit in on Granada’s weekly ticket meeting. During the meeting, two main topics that were discussed were scaling and papering for upcoming shows.

In the meeting, I learned that scaling is arranging the specific seating layouts for the shows playing at Granada. Because this venue is essentially a large standing room and there are no permanent seats, the staff is able to add or remove seats in the ‘o’, ‘i’, or ‘j’ shaped layouts which is chosen for a show depending on the amounts of general admission standing space there is needs to be, a band’s show capacity and the average age of the audience per band.

In addition to scaling, I was informed that papering was when a venue physically hands out tickets to upcoming shows that in most cases have minimal profit made and are far from the venue’s break even point. What was disputed over the meeting was how they were going to go about papering in the future in a way that actually made an impact on the profits. Normally, when a show isn’t selling well and is too close to show date, Granada will go papering in hopes that it will draw in a few more people to the concert, potentially allowing them to spend money at the bar in order to make up for the lost ticket profit.

Overall, I believe I learned more about concert promotion today than I have all year in my research and interviews, and I was really able to get an feel for what the career was as a whole as well. I really enjoyed getting to work with Ally today at her office and it was definitely a fun and beneficial end to a busy but exciting week.