Find the right person, and keep it above board

Take ten venue websites, any ten, and look for the email address. Nine times out of ten you'll get info@, hello@ or bookings@, and bookings@ means room hire. A shared inbox, read by whoever's on shift, who isn't the person putting the gigs on. Half the time the person putting the gigs on doesn't work there at all: they hire the room on a Thursday. In our database, UK venues that publish a direct booking address are a small minority of those with an email at all, and it's the same next door.

That's not a dead end. It's a door with someone behind it, and we're going to find out their name. Priya's email to Spare Room has been sitting in info@ for eight days.

Before you write, find a first name and a role. In the order that works best:

1. The venue's bookings, hire or about page. Grassroots venues often say outright “we don't book in-house, contact these promoters”, with names. Trap: the licensee on the sign above the door and the director in the company footer sign the contracts, they don't pick the bands.
2. Posters and past events. The promoter's logo in the corner of the poster, the “presented by” on the ticket page, with their own page a click away.
3. Thanks from bands who've played there. “Cheers to Tom for having us”: a first name, and proof the venue takes bands like you.
4. Local listings blogs and press, which name the promoter every time they preview a night.
5. Instagram search: the venue's name plus “presents” or “promotions”.

With a first name, your email to the generic address opens “Hi Kat,” and it changes nature: it's a message for someone, and whoever checks the inbox passes it on. Add the line that makes forwarding easy: “If someone else is putting the guitar nights on, could you forward this or point me their way?” It gives whoever's reading something they can actually do.

Eight days without a reply. Priya, Tuesday, 10am, tea going cold, goes back to Spare Room's website and clicks the one tab she'd skipped: Hire & bookings.

“We don't book bands in-house. The room is hired by promoters. Guitar nights: Bad Penny Promotions (Dave), Tuesdays and Thursdays. Low Ceiling, Fridays. In-house Saturdays: Kat. Please contact the promoters directly; we can't forward requests.”

Bad Penny's page, one click on: “Band submissions by email with SUPPORT in the subject and a live video. No DMs for first contact.” The 18 April is a Thursday.

Three minutes. A first name, an address, two nights a week, and a subject-line rule nobody would have guessed from the poster. The email goes out again at 10.40: “Subject: SUPPORT: Tarmac Daughters, 18 April, Spare Room: Wet Pavement. Hi Dave, found you via Spare Room's bookings page, after sending this to the room last week…”

Dave replies on the Thursday at 2.20pm: “Go on then. 18th, you open, 30 mins, get-in 6, bring the kit, £50 between you. Dave”

The UK reflex is the email to the promoter. Then, three days later, one short DM to the promo's page or the pub's account, no link, one follow-up only. The phone comes last, and only for a pub that books its own back room: early afternoon, never during service or on a gig night.

Whatever the channel, the job is the same: get a name and an address, or move your email up the pile. Nobody's buying a pitch.

The DM, more or less:

“Hi [first name], [you] from [band] here ([style], [town]). Emailed you on Tuesday about a support on one of your nights in May. Live video's in the email. No worries if it's not for you, just making sure it didn't get lost.”

Three outcomes, all good. They give you a name and an address: you resend within the hour, mentioning the message. “That's me, I'll have a look”: you say thanks and leave it. “We don't do original bands”: you cross them off, you've just saved yourself two follow-ups.

Next door it works differently. In France the reflex is the phone: a twenty-second call to the bar in the early afternoon gets you the name. In Germany, many clubs and Kulturzentren write in black and white “Bandbewerbungen nur per Formular, keine telefonischen Anfragen”: you fill the form in to the letter, then follow up by email. If a venue has written down how it wants to be contacted, that's the only right method.

Three made-up places, three ways of hiding a first name. For each one, read the snippets and find who books, with their role. Note where you found it too: in the DM, you'll say “saw it on your bookings page”.

A DM to the promo's page or the pub's account can unstick a silence, especially for pubs and small promoters, where the account is often run by the person who books. Short, no link in the first message (the filters would hide it), one follow-up. And never the personal account of a promoter you haven't met: you go from keen to creepy in a single message.

The rules of the game, for all three countries, fit in one sentence: one email at a time, written for that venue or that night, from your normal inbox, no mail-merge tool, no tracking pixel, your full signature, and a “won't email again” honoured from the first time they ask.

That's how the whole scene does it, and it's also what gets replies. The differences by country are in the tabs.

Look at your tracker. Forty lines, first names, the nights people do, a word to put in the subject, the name of a collective that puts six gigs a year on in a miners' welfare. What you've built over three chapters is your address book. It's worth what the relationships in it are worth: Dave who reads on the bus, Hannah who has a Thursday in May, Tom who replies in one line.

You keep it to yourself. Not as a file that does the rounds, not on a mailing platform, not lent to the band from the next town “to help them out”: every line only has value because it was you who looked, asked and wrote it down. Keep it up to date, and treat it as what it is: people, not a list.

You've got a first name, an address, sometimes the night they do and a word to put in the subject. Your tracker has stopped being a list of venues and become a list of people. All that's left is to write to them.