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Breaking Into The College Market

By Brandon Marcel

When I started out plotting for this week's article I initially was going to go another route. I was going to just explain about NACA (National Association of Campus Activities) and give a few pointers on when to and how to reach the student activities office for best results. However I was watching the show Mad Money the other day-a show for stock advice and things of that nature-when it hit me, diversification. Diversification is the key to success in the music industry, just as it is with a good stock portfolio. So rather than give you just those approaches to the college market which can be found anywhere (Derek Sivers of CDBaby has a great article on it here), I'm going to give a few other options to help you attack the college market at full force.

Send Out Flyers - Sending flyers out to the student activities office is a great, cheap way to develop leads. Even better though, is the fact that by this method you have some control over where the responses from your flyers come from. In other words, if you only send them out to colleges within your state or current touring region, then you should only get responses from those areas. This cuts down on traveling cross-country for one show spending x amount of dollars and time getting there which in the end could save you money.

Send Out Cd Samplers - I got this idea off of the Real World back to New York series when the members of the house worked with Arista Records as interns. On one of the shows their tasks was to contact a number of larger fraternities and sororities in an effort to give them cds of a new act Arista was promoting. You too could do this simply using the internet to get contact info and burning a few hundred ( I know, that could take forever) cd-rs and shipping them to the sororities and frats to be given away to members and at parties to help get buzz on a certain campus. Word of mouth works great on campus' and even from campus to campus, remember, that's initially how Napster took off.

Be willing to Negotiate - Not every campus' budgets for entertainment are huge. Expressing that you have different types of performances available for different budgets on your flyers could lead to you booking more shows. For instance, you could offer your full band at the highest price, and acoustic performance or one man show (lead singer and cd track) for cheaper prices. Remember in your early going every little bit helps.

Finally, College Radio - In many

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