Featured Artist – Adams Dagger

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As promised, we’re going to start featuring independent artists that are out there hustling for themselves! There ARE success stories and I want to share them. We can learn from one another..so let’s share information!

First up, Adams Dagger. They recently toured the entire US from southern California to NYC and back. Self booked, no agent, and actually came home with money in hand! I hit up the band’s drummer, Mick, and asked him to share some insight as to how they turned this tour into an indie success!  Here’s the story…

Mick, Adams Dagger did something most signed bands can’t do – come home from a national tour with money in your pocket! Let’s focus on how you did that. First, how long was the tour?

The tour was 20 days. We played 16 shows during that time.

Before leaving, did you budget tour expenses like hotels, per diems, and gas? If so, what exactly did you include in your budget?

The only thing initially budgeted was gas expenses. I knew that from the guarantees we had we would “almost” cover gas for the entire tour. There were no per diems. The first time out was every man for himself. We weren’t planning on staying in hotels much at all, just sleeping in the van mostly or staying with friends or family.

If any, what budgeted items did you spend more on than expected and what items did you find a savings?

We actually spent less on gas than I thought we would. As a band we packed a cooler full of food before we left. We did pretty good not eating out a lot for the first week. Eventually I ended up spending more money on food than I wanted to. Too much good stuff in all the cities I wanted to try.

Give us some details like how many hotel rooms, how many nights sleeping in the van, etc.

We only stayed in hotels twice on the whole tour. Luckily we were able to stay with friends and family for about half of the time. The rest was sleeping in the van. This first time out it was really hard getting venues and bars to book us… So we just had to go with what we got, even if it was 600-800 miles away from where we just played. Sometimes we didn’t have time to stop and stay just taking turns sleeping and driving. Truck stops are helpful too. Flying J’s and Pilot’s offer trucker lounges and showers are $7.00. For $2.99 you can use the wi-fi for two hours if need be.

Did you have any show guarantees on this tour?

We had guarantees between $40 and $100 dollars. We did have one for $200 and another for $150, so those two really helped out.

What was it that provided the most income? Shirts? CDs? The Bar?

As far as profit goes would be shirts. Everything we took with us was already paid for. We pay $100 a month band dues and that bought our shirts, stickers, free download cards and 7” records. Some bars didn’t give us anything to play so we had to try to hustle shirts or records on people to get some extra gas money.

What did you do on off nights?

The only “off nights” we had that we didn’t have to drive 600+ miles between venues was in Brooklyn, NY. We stayed at one of my friends houses and hung out in the city a bit… We also had a decent amount of time to burn in Chicago. We went to Guitar Center and wished we had money and found some Chicago dogs to eat. Mostly a lot of driving kept us from burning excess money.

What was the biggest surprise?

Coming back with money! We all had in our mindset before we left that if we come back at zero, than it was a successful tour. The guarantees we had didn’t even cover gas for 8,000 miles of traveling. Luckily gas prices were down at the time. We ended up selling out of all the shirts we brought with us and a majority of the records too.

What else, if anything, can you attribute to a financially successful tour?

We hustled the best we could. We don’t have a cd, just a 7” and a lot of peoples excuse to not buy it is that they don’t have a record player… Luckily for us it comes with a free download, so you don’t need a record player, which was a big sales point. Even though you feel like an asshole doing it walk around after your set with a couple records, asking for $5.00. Some people may have really liked the show but are too shy to walk to the merch booth to check everything out or even too drunk. We kept our merch reasonably priced so that helped. Getting $5 or $10 out of someone for a shirt or record isn’t too bad. Plus offering free items like stickers and download cards with a free song drive a lot of people to the table. We have really made a lot of fans by handing out free songs and stickers.

Anything you learned that you’d like to share?

Were still learning. Next tour I really don’t want to have to drive 500-800 miles every other night to get to the next city. If you can keep everything close you will save a ton on gas money. Back in January we did a small 10 day south-west tour. We were getting around 9 miles to the gallon. I gave the van a proper tune up and we were getting close to 14 mpg this time around! Also on that same tour we burned around 250 cd’s and printed a cover with the release date and info for the EP that was coming out in April. A lot of people we saw the second time around that we gave the cd to bought the 7”

Check the band out at AdamsDagger.com