Lucy Woodward
"Consider this course if you are serious about touring your music. ANYONE CAN BOOK A GIG is excellent. I've been in this business forever, and I still learned a boatload and then some. Full disclosure, Katherine McVicker is one of my agents, and I know she knows the biz. Amazingly she's giving us all her tools and insights she's gathered over the years."
Through MWI, Lucy has performed throughout Europe at Bimhuis in Amsterdam, Glasgow International Jazz Festival, Blue Note Milano, Duc Des Lombards in Paris, Théâtre de l'Opéra de Tunis, Villa in Blues Festival in Brugnera, Italy, Tbilisi Jazz Festival, Summer Light Festival in Wolfsburg, Germany, Sicilia Jazz Festival, Padova Jazz Festival, and Istanbul Jazz Festival, among many others.
Maybe some of these common issues sound familiar...
✔ You feel like you're always booking shows at the same places.
✔ You want to strategically set up tour routes but don't know where to start.
✔ You're unsure who you should be targeting and where you should be performing.
✔ You love to perform but the whole booking process seems too complicated and time-consuming.
✔ You can't help feeling that you just don't understand how to advance your music career.
Chances are, you've been trying to figure out on your own how to make a living playing music. You have a fan base, and you know that you're ready to tour and expand your audience, but you just don't know how.
Here's some good news.
Booking a tour is not as hard as you think.
Just A Minute Of Your Time
Perhaps we can interest you with our video
Let’s face it. Making a career out of playing music isn’t easy.
Realistically, you probably have barely enough time to focus on your music, let alone plan a tour, learn the industry’s ropes, and deal with fast-talking, non-committal promoters. With everything else you have going on, there’s either no time or budget to focus on building your skills in booking shows for yourself.
You wonder how the pros got to where they are and how you’re expected to understand how to promote yourself, negotiate deals, create contracts, know what a good deal is or where you’ve been taken advantage of, and nabbed yourself a lousy deal. Or worse, you've been given a good deal for your situation, but you pass it up.
You need assistance, guidance, support, help. That’s where we come in.
From the booking agent who created Norah Jones’ breakthrough tour in 2002 and jump-started the European careers of Grammy award-winning artists like Samara Joy, Esperanza Spalding and Richard Bona, Katherine McVicker created this program for career-musicians to learn how to book themselves tours that build an audience, expand reach, and cumulatively bring in higher fees over time.
Without help from a booking agent.
Here's what you get when you sign up for the online course
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Engaging content on a learning platform designed for your success
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Step-by-step learning modules written by pros
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Equivalent of 200+ pages of textbook content
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16 authentic and fluff-free videos
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7 deep dive mini-courses to enrich your learning
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Weekly progress task lists to keep you on track and motivated
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30 downloadable worksheets and active file templates to integrate the material
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Video walkthroughs and tutorials of the spreadsheets we use to book tours for our artists at MWI
Anyone Can Book a Gig flips the negative and limiting beliefs stopping you from booking your dreams shows.
In our six-step program, you’ll:
- Understand how to calculate financial deals in a partnership with promoters and build a relationship with a venue to increase your profit and grow your audience.
- Gain an in-depth understanding of all the component parts of a performance contract and the right way to negotiate it.
- Learn how to store, present, and organize your promotional material to make sure you look professional.
- Be able to use industry terminology when talking with other industry experts and advocate for yourself.
- Know all the real do’s and don’ts of talking with promoters.
- Think outside of the box with our specialized techniques to market your music on and offline.
Our downloadable worksheets and templates help you:
- Pull together a Tour History - the #1 thing you need to have in order to negotiate higher fees with a promoter.
- Build your own professional and agency-approved performance contracts for local and international touring
- Write a killer Artist’s Biography - one of the most important assets in your toolkit
- Keep track of your media and share your promo material all in one place with a Tour Assets sheet
- Create your own boiler-plate press release for any event announcement or new music drop
- Emergency and add-on contracting documents like broadcasting addendums, technical rider examples, invoice templates, and more
- Accurately estimate show costs and build a tour budget
Anyone Can Book a Gig
Learn the Six Steps that will help you book shows
Our self-managed online course is in six complete steps. Each one is specifically designed to explain the live touring industry’s basics to anyone considering a performing career in music. In addition to instruction, you’ll get the Essential Artist Toolkit with over 60 downloadable files, including contract and rider templates, tour history sheets, worksheets, videos, and more. Our goal is to give artists the no-fluff tools and strategies they need to successfully book shows at any stage of their career.
Our track record speaks for itself
Our company has booked memorable performances by our clients on almost every continent. We've partnered with some of the biggest names in the record industry, (including Quincy Jones) to book our roster of Grammy award-winning artists at countless of festivals and venues, including Blue Note clubs in Asia, South America, and Europe, and famed international festivals like North Sea Jazz, Montreux, Melbourne, Umbria, Montreal, Jarasum, to name a few.
We created this course with the confidence of 30 years of routing and booking international tours for jazz and world music legends.
Music Works International and Katherine McVicker come together with decades of experience in booking and routing tours, marketing and branding artists, producing concerts, and more.
In her 30-year career specializing in jazz and world music, Katherine has helped to develop and support the international livelihoods of a wide range of artists, including Grammy award-winning artists like Samara Joy, Norah Jones, Wayne Shorter, Joshua Redman, Branford Marsalis, Richard Bona, Dianne Reeves, Jason Moran, Kurt Elling, Christian McBride, Jon Cleary, Vijay Iyer, and Lizz Wright. We took the knowledge, shortcuts, and hard knocks accumulated over years and rolled it into Anyone Can Book A Gig.
After workshops and private consultations with artists, we knew we could create this course to help musicians develop the confidence they need to book their own shows, market and promote gigs, and make a plan for successful live performance careers.
Meet the author
Katherine McVicker
If you’ve done any kind of serious work in jazz, you’ve probably heard of our director, booking agent, Katherine McVicker. In 2002, she launched the European touring career of Norah Jones and spent seven years developing Jones’ profile internationally. After three decades in the music industry as an agent developing the touring careers for dozens of internationally renowned jazz and world artists alive today, Katherine founded boutique agency Music Works International (MWI) in 2014. Today, MWI books over 500 performances each year worldwide and represents over 30 of the top jazz, Americana, and world music artists performing today. Now, through this course, Katherine and MWI are offering this expertise, accrued over years of experience, to musicians everywhere.
Don't take it from us, take it from our award-winning artists.
We help musicians at all stages of their careers get to where they want to be.
Our curriculum has been educator-tested and approved.
PHOTO CREDITS Singer by Vishnu R Nair/Unsplash. Busker "Cloudy London Day" by Maaria Lohiya/Unsplash. Concert Audience by Freder/Canva. Video thumbnail "Dhangsha and Bantu" by Amar Cura, courtesy of the photographer. Gulfer/Greenvans photo courtesy of Greenvans. Anyone Can Book A Gig simulated textbook cover ** is "Bokanté, Union Chapel, London 2017" photograph by Tatiana Gorilovsky, courtesy of Bokanté/GroundUP Music. The background behind the books is "Snarky Puppy, San Jose, 2012" by Cynthia St. Cyr, courtesy of the photographer. Singer with Cowboy Hat by Lachlan Ross/Pexels. "Empty Concert Stage" by Dennis Kuvaev/Canva.
**Anyone Can Book A Gig textbook by Katherine McVicker/Music Works International will be published in 2023.
"Anyone Can Book A Gig" is owned by Music Works International, trademark pending.