Playing a UK Mela or Asian Music Festival | TAP

A daytime mela with families on the grass, a club night, a university society show and a ticketed festival stage are four different rooms with four different jobs. Ask what time you are on, who is on either side of you, and roughly who comes. If the person booking you cannot answer that, that is also an answer.

Length, stage, sound check time, whether there is a backline, and who is providing what. A verbal yes on a phone call becomes a twenty-minute slot with no monitors on the day. One email confirming it protects you and costs nothing.

If your record needs a dhol player, a second vocalist, or tracks running from something, say so now rather than at the sound check. Organisers can usually solve a problem they know about a month out and almost never one they hear about on the day.

A photograph, a short bio, spellings, social handles, a track for the announcement. Send it all in one message the day they ask. Being the artist whose assets arrived first is worth more than it sounds when they are deciding who goes in the programme.

A confirmed date is one of the few things that makes a second email to a radio show worth sending. Keep it to two lines: the record, the date, the event. It gives a producer a reason to play the record that week rather than any other week.

Most events have a small number of outlets and photographers who cover them every year, and the organiser knows exactly who they are. That list took them years to build and they will usually share it. It is far better than any list you could assemble cold.

Inflated crowd numbers and borrowed billing are checkable and everybody in a circuit this small checks. Say what the event is and let it be what it is. A modest true credit outlasts an impressive false one.

It is the only chance to fix anything and it is the moment the people running the stage decide whether you are easy to work with. Turning up late for it is remembered long after the set is forgotten.

A daytime family crowd and a late club crowd want different things, and neither of them is a compromise of the other. Know which one you are playing to and shape the running order for it. This is the whole difference between a set that works and a good set that lands badly.

One phone on a tripod, front of house, held sideways, for the whole set. Not a friend in the crowd holding it. Footage from this afternoon is what gets you booked next year, and it is the single most common thing artists forget to arrange.

The event photographer is shooting the whole day and has no duty to you. Ask them, politely and in advance, for two frames of your set, and offer to credit them. If that is not possible, arrange somebody yourself. One good live photograph earns its keep for two years.

At the start and again before the last song, with the name of the record. Most of the people watching came for the day rather than for you, and the ones who liked it need to know what to search for. It takes four seconds and artists skip it constantly.

A clip from the set, one photograph, a line about the day. The event is current for a few days and then it is not. If you wait until the edit is perfect you will post it in three weeks to nobody.

Short, specific, no ask attached. Say what went well from your side and that you would come back. Organisers book from a shortlist of people who were easy to deal with, and that message is how you get onto it.

One line and a link. It is a new true thing about a record they already supported, which is the only kind of follow-up email worth sending. It is also the strongest possible answer to a producer wondering whether you can perform.

Thirty to sixty seconds of the best part of the set, with sound that survives a phone speaker. This becomes the thing you attach when a booker, a station or a journalist asks what you are like live.

A journalist unfamiliar with this music will sometimes reach for a fusion or exotic angle without meaning anything by it. You can head that off by giving them accurate words first: the language, the form, the producer, what the songs are about. Most writers use what they are given.

Specialist outlets and mainstream ones need different first lines, not different stories. Lead with what the record is for a specialist desk and with what has happened for a general one. Nothing underneath changes.

If you do not know the attendance, do not print one. Say the event, the stage and the year. Everybody who could check will, and being caught inflating a crowd is the kind of thing that follows an artist around.

Not every one you could play. The ones where your music belongs and the audience would come back. Three good rooms a year beats ten mismatched ones, and mismatched sets are how a reputation for being wrong for a bill gets built.

Most annual events are booked months ahead. Find out when they build the bill and be in touch before that, with footage rather than a description. Approaching a week after the lineup went out is the most common wasted email in live music.

Name, event, date, what they said, whether it went well. This is the same file as your radio list and it should live in the same place. Rebuilding it every year is the largest avoidable cost in doing this yourself.