Welcome to Episode 26 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the band. I've podcast. As always. I am one of your hosts, James Cross and I have here with me for an even numbered episode, which is unusual.

Aaron Gingras of suburban samurai man. It's been too long since we've talked already today, Erin, who I am feeling pretty shut any. How are you today? I'm doing well. It's definitely weird to be at home. I've left the house once since March 16th, and I shouldn't say I've left the house ones. I've interacted with the public once since March 16th. Today is April 25th. I've left the house pretty much every day to go for walks and stuff, but that's the beauty of living on a mountain like you could go for a walk and not run into anyone and be perfectly safe.

For those of you who are listening and don't have that luxury, I'm truly sorry. It's so nice to get outside every day and just be a little bit active. How is it for you? I know you're in, uh, Waterbury. For now. For now. How is it for you? I know you mentioned the other day you're doing a lot of walking when we were on Facebook Messenger, But yeah. How is it? Yeah, You know, there's a, uh I don't know, a pandemic or something going on. When you you when you hear that I am turning into somebody who walks or runs or usually the drumming kind of, you know, for 10 or 12 hours a week kind of takes care of it for me, but, um, yeah, no doing good.

Getting as much fresh air is is possible. Well, kind of following all the the guidelines we need to follow. And yeah, I've actually, I am, despite everything being a little funny looking are goofy. Um, I'm sure everybody is aware of these days. I'm actually before this thing kind of started. We were moving or were preparing to move. And my wife and I were kind of in a unique situation where we weren't really able toe back out of that. And so we're actually, Yeah, we're moving into a house, Uh ah.

Lot closer to you, actually, in the same town, kind of the other side of it. So that'll happen. Fingers crossed middle of May. So we still got some time for, you know, either certain things to maybe relax a little more than they currently are. But if not at the end of the day, I think Kate and I are, you know, two person team and we'll power through and on the other end will spill out in a house. And one of the things I'm most excited about probably the fact that I'll be able to kind of outfit pretty big room with anything that I need.

Thio support my musical habits so that's super exciting. Whether it's, you know, recording free production stuff, rehearsals, uh, just kind of being loud. For whatever reason, it will be able to happen there so super fortunate to be ableto do something like that ever and obviously not to mention during times like these, so exciting. Well, that's awesome. Congratulations. That's by the time this episode comes out, you will hopefully be in that house if everything goes well. So fingers crossed, knock on wood, all that stuff. That's a huge step.

And it'll be cool once covert ends that we can actually hang out because it only be about 10 or 15 minutes away instead of almost an hour. Yeah, it'll be awesome. And I'll either have Thio between now and then give you the zoom tour or I'll be what, like like, it's like six minutes away or something rather than drive down the highway. So be super cool. Yeah, absolutely. You know, on that note, I'm sure with everything in the house, there must be a paperwork flying back and forth between you and the realtor and the owner and everything going on.

So you must be spending a lot of time communicating for this deal to go through. Yeah, I don't ever want to do this again, you know. But as well as with everything, if you haven't done something the first time you do it. It's a great learning experience, and if and when it happens again, it will be even better prepared and that that's not limited toe moving. That's, you know, is everybody listening knows with band stuff, and you know how you could literally be a doctor. And until you, you know, educate yourself for do something specific, you happen to have not done it yet.

I can't even imagine how much paperwork you're going through. I only assume that it's mountains of paperwork. But on that note Oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, I think the same thing you were going to say which was Which sort of leads into what we're going to talk about today. Communication? Yes, today's episode is all about communication, because right now, with people not really being able to talk face to face, having clear communication in the digital world is more important than ever, and communication is really important.

In general, we've done episodes about specific parts of communication before. Good communication really can give you teeth. That's for teamwork, efficiency, effectiveness, total accountability and health and safety teeth. So today we're going to talk a little bit about different types of communication, and I do want to throw out there under teeth. The total accountability is really important because it means that if somebody understands and has in writing what they're responsible for, then they are accountable for that because then they can't say, Oh, sorry, like I didn't know I was supposed to do.

It's like, Well, it was literally in writing and you saw it. So you knew. Now I'm not saying be a jerk about holding somebody accountable, but you can put your foot down and say, Hey, you said you were going to do this. You agreed to it and you didn't And thats financial or otherwise, you can keep people accountable, and in general it just makes life easier if everyone is on the same page. Yeah, things aren't going to fall through the cracks. And, you know, and as you're saying at the end of the day, first and foremost, make sure that you're honest and accountable yourself towards your partners, Whether they're band members or other people and a za.

Long as things are, ideas and responsibilities are mutually agreed to and clearly communicated upfront asl ong. As you know, at the end of the day, if something didn't get done, um, you know, you kind of have a duty to yourself and almost to the other people that kind of be honest about what went well and what didn't go well. And, you know, if something didn't go well and you're honest and what's the word positive communicating any sort of Hey, this didn't go well. Or, you know, if you're talking about challenges in a productive way, it's, you know, it's not really your fault if you're you know, if the only thing you can be honest about is, you know, something that ended up being a little bit more challenging than it should have.

Yeah, definitely. And we've split this up into three sections. Why don't we just go for it? And do you wanna run us through this first section and what we're gonna be talking about? Yeah. So we've split this episode into three sections based on sort of who your audience is or who the groups made of that you're communicating with. The first one is intra band, which is basically our way of saying, you know, it's internal. So if you're in a band, chances are the first people to pop in your mind.

It's your band members. It's good to keep solid notes anytime you have ideas flying back and forth. I mean, I think for the majority of us, you know the people in bands or in this world, you know, Ah, lot of our ideas come to us at 2. 30 in the morning or or, you know, odd hours of the day. And you guys all know the our circadian rhythm doesn't always align with the rest of the world so good to keep selling notes, communicate in writing anywhere possible. So that way, you've got a record of what's transpired or the ideas so you can refer back to them later.

And the new ideas, important notices or updates about things that have already happened. And again, this is your team. You're close team band members. There are other few types of people who could also qualify. Anybody who's on your team, if it's your agent, the people you're working close with an episode or two ago we talked about we riffed on the idea of an accountant for a while. I think it was your conversation with Josh, who he had on the show. Anybody who's just a much a part of your team as the rest of your band Yeah, absolutely.

I think you know your team could be management booking agent like you, said Aaron. Anyone who is working directly for you, If they're working for you, they're part of your team. If they're not working for you, they're probably not part of your team. It's the easiest way to avoid conflict and kind of just keep things simple and clear and, to the point as much as possible, kind of Uncluttered. And if you want to check out Episode 14 roles and Responsibilities, determining who is the band parent while the kids play, I believe James, That was you and Matt, and you touched on a lot of really good points and figuring out what all this means and how your relationships with these people should work.

Yeah, absolutely. And for anyone who hasn't heard that episode or would like to go back and take a refresher, just head on over to Band. I've dot rocks slash 14 That's the number 14, and you can listen to that episode directly to hear what is going on and why it's so important to have someone basically assigned to every task in your band on that No Erin that's we're gonna try to keep these quick and concise because there's a lot of content to talk to. And so that's why for each of these sections, we are gonna have a past episode to refer to that maybe doesn't cover communication directly, but is relevant to these topics in some way.

Shape reform so you can get more information, get more ideas, because what we're stressing in this episode is that communication is really important. These other episodes that we're referring to, for the most part, are why that communication is important steaming right on through this. Let's tackle the next section. Erin. Yeah, so the first one was in truck band communication, and this next one is inter band communication. And what that means is, you zoom out to that next level, it's band to band. If we're talking about you know your band, it's how your band communicates with another band or entity.

You can kind of think of it like, you know, if you ever ever taken a business class or course or 10 any reading or listening on YouTube or something, it's kind of the same as business to business again. All the same, points. This sort of communication is important because it keeps you on the same page with the bands you're working with, whether it's a show that somebody's planning to produce, whether it's having to do with a guest feature on a song, maybe you're working towards, you know, putting out a split or a compilation with these people again, this communication is very important because it's it's sort of, you know, it sits in between the internal communication within your band.

That's kind of the first step toe interacting with people. Outside of that, that Titus closest bubble. Any important info should be noted writing just like the other bullet point when one piece that's important, that kind of applies to all of this is any records. Obviously it differs depending on exactly what you're talking about, but it would be important to wherever you can make sure that all of those notes or the records anything that you guys have put together in support of any conversations or ideas that you're all working on together, the everybody has access to that information, whether it's to create new notes for new ideas, expand on old ideas or, you know, make any corrections.

Ah, big part of communicating is is allowing everybody to communicate and participate. You know, we we explored this a bit in. I think it's Episode five how you can get more shows outside your home town. That's a big one. Because again, if you try to pick your shows like I have in the past where you're really building something up from the ground from nothing and you're the one out there communicating with other bands trying to pull them into what you've got going on trying to build a database of, you know what acts and what locations may be available or who's out there for promoters, you may be able to work with anything like that.

This all comes into play and you want to make sure that you're set up and kind of thinking in the right way in terms of just being organized, being respectful, being open and communicative with these people. Yeah, really. What it comes down to is when you're working with other people, you have to all work together. You can't just march to the beat of your own drum. Yeah, you could, but that won't work. Yeah, and that will become very clear very quickly. Yeah, I think it's something that too many bands kind of see themselves as an isolated unit.

And while they might have decent communication internally, when it comes to communicating externally, things just don't happen. I can't remember if it was an example you gave us, Erin or if it was something Matt said. But there was a band who canceled the show the night of Via instagram d m That was you, right? We were driving to load in. It was like a matinee show in Boston and we were getting off the exit were early. It was like three loaded was for 4. 30 were 15 minutes away. And, yeah, like an hour before loaded, the band communicated that they had broken up a little surreal.

Yeah, come on, you could play one last show. Just send out a quick message on Facebook to your fans and say, Hey, this is our last show Ever be there in an hour or forever Miss us. It was super surprising that something nutty happened so quickly and so like like you're saying like, Oh my gosh, wouldn't it be easier just to like there's this internal band conflict what we had assumed that, like, you know, they had an internal conflict. Let's just do one Mauritz literally an hour away.

So we kind of had some fun trying to speculate. Like, Wow, that must have been bad. What was for you to like? You know, it's harder to like, not go to the show at that point. That's funny, because I have a similar story in Boston, which ties into our next section, because I was on tour with a friend's band, helping tour, manage and filling in on bass. And it wasn't the same day. But I think 2 to 3 days before the show, the promoter reached out and said Yes, So the venue closed.

We're not gonna have a show. Oh my gad que frantic searching for a show Because this was Ah, five show weekend tour, which ended up being a three show weekend tour because of the Boston show fell through. We weren't able to find something else, so we ended up doing an acoustic performance in my friend's living room in exchange for being allowed to sleep there on. Then, you know, I went to school in Boston So I had friends there, and that's one of the parks. Is he liked the band.

So I said, Hey, will you let us crash here? We'll do an acoustic show for you and any friends you want to invite over. So he had some family and friends over, and we did an acoustic show in his living room. And then another show a couple of days later also fell through. So that was just beyond our control. You know, like the venue shutting down like there's nothing you could do about that. Unfortunately, So it was just weird to all of a sudden get a Facebook message from the promoter, and he sent it to the singer but basically said, Yeah, the venue closed.

There's no show. Sorry. Oh, my God. It's like, Okay, thanks, Boston. So I guess Boston is a little tricky. I mean, sure, it happens in every city, but we both have stories about Boston, so that's kind of funny, but yeah, jumping right on into that third section, which is external communication. Go ahead and take it away. So, I mean, as you kind of just pointed out, like sometimes some things are just completely out of your control, despite your own and your team members and hopefully the other.

Any other parties involved, despite their best efforts to things do just happen. And so the best thing that you can do, what would you feel good about having done? Looking back at today's whatever's going on two weeks from now? And the best thing that you could do is just communicate clearly, be level headed, be positive and, you know stuff happens and the next time around when you're dealing with that person. If whatever it was, it happened just, you know, happened despite everybody's best effort, they'll remember that you know you were level had didn't positive and communicated eso again.

It's external communication is the third tier. That's communication with third parties who you work with, whether it's venues, promoters, uh, you know, labels or other entities who, you know you aren't signed to or in bed with, uh, you know, representatives of other bands or other acts. But the other part of that could be the external communication is quite obviously communication towards fans or potential fans. The public at large. That's a big part of it, too. Obviously ties into your media, how you communicate and sort of present yourself in person, jumping backwards a little bit.

That could also be like show advances. So again, even when you sort of are still tied pretty close to that communicating business to business mindset. Once you start communicating with those external people, when you're tryingto book a tour or book a show that's an external booking agent or buyer that's an external promoter, there is some overlap toe all of these. And so, thankfully, you know, we're talking a little bit about some of the tools that you can use that more or less could apply to a lot of these scenarios.

But one example. If you wanna check out Episode 13, which was pre show communication, it can save your show and your life. You should check that out. Another episode example would be a couple later Episode 15 Relationships in Your Image, how you and your band are one and the same. There's a lot of good content in both. That was sort of tie into some of the themes that we're talking about today again. This sort of is all in a funny way, kind of married together in one way or another.

And as we all know, you know, there are often situations where you know a single individual does where multiple hats. So it's all married together. It's all related, but it is important to sort of understand who you're communicating with. Also, the why behind the what or the how exactly, and you know, Thio with both of those episodes. Episode 13 Pre show Communication was all about show advances and a story that I told them that episode, which I will tell quickly here is people have probably heard about Van Halen and the Brown Eminem's or rather, the lack thereof that all started because there was an accident at a show they were playing where the promoter this was at a college venue didn't read the rider specifically enough didn't follow the guidelines.

And because of that promoter and his staff not taking precautions, the stage sank through the floor. So from that point on, Van Halen started putting the brown Eminem's clause in their rider to see how closely people were paying attention. And if they found Brown Eminem's, they knew that the promoter was slacking, essentially and would do a full safety check of all essential systems that somebody could get hurt if they failed. And so I'm sure that at some points delayed shows if you have to go over every single thing.

But it's all in the name of safety. Better safe than sorry. So that's why that's a really important episode. And then same thing for number 15 relationships in your image. You are an extension of your brand. So communication is really something that's important because not only do you have to communicate to your fans what is important for them to know, but you have to communicate in a manner that puts you in a good light, whether you're on the band page, your personal page, damning people, you have to be careful.

I mean, there's a whole rabbit hole that we didn't talk about in that episode, which we could have, Which is the Bands and YouTubers, who back in 2014 2015. There was a rash of scandals about bands doing sketchy stuff with under aged women. That's an extension of your image and your relationships with your fans. And doing stuff like that jeopardizes your career. Not only are you a bad person if you do things like that, but it could end your career. Look at Jake Miguel fresh. I'm not going to say his stage name because I don't want to give them any promotion, but his career is over.

He was an up and coming artist, and like that, his career was gone. To be honest, that's what he deserves. So I'm glad that's what happened to him and that he was discovered. But you really have to be careful and basically just be a decent person when you're interacting with anyone. That's what that whole episode was about. Was just be a good person, that's all. But you should definitely still go back and listen to those two episodes if you haven't heard him yet because they are so incredibly important for any band.

And on that note, Episode 13, I realized, was half our podcast episodes ago, because this is Episode 26. Fun fact 26 is half a year. So our podcast, this is the half birthday of the Bandhive podcast. Virtual high five for that and fake zoo. Yeah, if we weren't social distancing, you would hear an actual high five right now, maybe I'll drop in like a high five sound effect or something to celebrate. Those were the three main types of communication for a band. Now we're going to talk about some of the tools which, in my opinion, are mostly for internal communication, because that's where you're going to need to keep logs of everything with external communication.

You should keep logs of what the other party says and what you agreed Thio. But they're also going to have their own system to track what you say, because different companies are not always going to use the same tools. And you don't wanna have toe start using different tools for every single person you work with. That would be more of a mess than not starting off with stuff that's really useful for internal or intra band communications. So that's you and your team. I love using slack. It's a great app that lets you have different channels and threads and keep all communication logged concisely, and it's free for the last 10,000 messages, and then anything before that just disappears.

But for most bands, 10,000 messages should be plenty. That should be at least a year, if not more off, back and forth. So if there's anything super important, save it. But aside from that 10,000 messages, that will be plenty for you to keep stuff going. An alternative to that is discord, which isn't quite as good as slack for business purposes. Discord. If you're familiar with gaming at all, you probably know discord already. It's essentially the same app, except you don't have threads, and your account is not necessarily unique.

It's open and you can join any so called discord server. It does have voice and video chat, though, so that's why I'm mentioning it here because right now people don't see each other face to face. Usually, Slack doesn't have video chat while discord does. Personally, I would much prefer slack and zoom being used together, or Skype or facetime or whatever you want to use over discord. But if you and your band all play games already and you all have discord, just make a private server for your band and use that you know how to use it.

Why learn something else? If that's the path of least resistance, go for it. If you don't already all have discord, then I would definitely recommend slack. A classic one is a Facebook group or a group message that works to an extent, but the issue is their pain to search, and you can't have different channels. You can have threads, but you cannot have channels. So those three are great for internal stuff. A Facebook group. I honestly recommend it for external communication with fans as well. That's a great way to build loyalty and interact with your community.

And with Facebook moving away from pages and more towards community and groups, that's something that all bands should be focusing on. Is building their fan base in a group to keep their core fans happy and active. Another really great app that you could use both for intra band and Inter band communication is teamwork. It's a project management app. Even companies like to Dario, who makes guitar strings, use teamwork to keep their business running. So if you find yourself getting overwhelmed, think of teamwork like a task manager, but for projects.

So if, for example, you have a checklist that you do every time you book a show which hopefully will all be booking shows again soon as soon as it's safe. To do so, you can have a template for your checklist. And then when you book a show, you create a new master task, which is, for example, get everything for this show together. And then with that template, all the sub tasks show up saying Okay, you know these air, the 25 tasks I have to do to be prepared for this show.

And here's deadlines based on the time that it's due. So you can say, you know, the master task is due the day of show and then everything else you know, these air do a week before these air do a month before you can set it up like that to base it on the final due date, which I think is really, really handy. Dolly old school. Erin. We both use Google docks and sheets for Bandhive. This outline that we're reading from is in Google docks. We have a bunch of information in Google sheets.

You just sent over an awesome spreadsheet to me a week or two ago that we're gonna be giving away to Bandhive fans for tracking your shows. So you have a better understanding, or rather, an overview of the shows you've played and the key information from each of those shows and then last but not least, dropbox, which is really important for storing anything permanently. Personally, I pay the like $12 a month for a paid Dropbox subscription because you could actually have stuff that has saved your dropbox and accessible from your main computer but not taking up space on your hard drive, which I absolutely love.

And if you're gonna do that, Dropbox is great for sharing files with third parties for storing any kind of contract that everyone in the band needs toe have accessible. You know, you can create a shared folder that, you know, the whole band, and anyone on your team could see. But they don't see the rest of your stuff on Dropbox. So I think that's really great. And having some kind of file and folder structure is so important because if you just put all your contract into a folder called Contract well, in five years, you're not gonna be able to find anything you want.

But if you have, for example, contracts 2020 2019 2018 and a folder for each year. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is you could have yearly folders and then have sub folders for contracts and other things like show advances and all that kind of stuff in there. You could really break it up, however you want. Personally, I'm a big fan of year and then detail, but you can also do detail and then year for each detailed category. But that's really up to you on how you want to do it.

And I mean, as long as you've got your file structure down totally, you can use Google Suite and Google Drive and Dropbox for I'd argue almost any kind of communication again as long as you have your file structure down and it's, you know, very clear what files and what folders are accessible to who. That would be a great way Thio again create and share in real time is, well, Azaz. You know, if somebody needs to show file stage, plot input list something that you can't or don't want to send via email, that's a great way toe share.

Those things do. Yeah, and on that note, one thing I want to stress for external communication when you're dealing with third parties is, don't ever use Facebook messenger or Text Messenger. If you can at all avoid it, because then it is a pain to track down. WHO said WHAT where anything important should be in your email. Now if it's the day of the show and you're texting updates to the promoter saying, Hey, this is when we're gonna be there or last minute questions like something pops up and you have to ask a question.

That's fine. But anything related? Thio finance contracts Booking should absolutely be an email, because that is the easiest place to find what has been communicated with third parties outside of your team. And I would argue that most people probably not everybody. Everybody has their own preference. But most people social media, it's either exclusively used for personal communication. Or it might be a mix of, you know, if again, if they do prefer certain communication to come and be a social Web, that's not my favorite, but people do it.

My point that I'm trying to make is James's. You're saying on your end, if you're able to keep all of that important business activity to email certain areas in Google or Dropbox. You know those areas. When people check those things, they're going to be using a certain part of their brain probably a different part of their brain, than when they're just scrolling through Facebook. So as a Z, you said, it's a lot easier to get lost in a lot of other things, and you sort of just become part of the clutter that is social media, especially if you're sending really important stuff.

If you messenger as you mentioned, it's super hard to track down and search, but also they're probably going to be using it part of their brain when they're scrolling through Facebook. Then they would be when they're like, Okay, it's work time. I'm checking my email, my dropbox, that sort of a thing. Ah, 100%. It's good to have those boundaries, and I'm happy to talk business with people on Facebook. But as soon as there is mention of any kind of financial stuff or agreement, I'm like, Hey, let's take this to email because at that point I want to be able to track down the agreement in the future and refer back to it.

Even if there's nothing wrong, I just wanna have it there. So I know that I can find it by searching my email. It's not necessarily because I'm preparing for something bad to happen. It's because I want to be able to find it, that's all. And so no matter who you're communicating with, whether it's your bandmates or other bands or external third parties, your fans, venues, promoters, labels that you're not signed to anything like that, you want to make sure that your communication has teeth. So that means you can have teamwork.

It's efficient, it's effective. There's total accountability, and it adds up to solid health and safety that does it for this episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thank you again for listening. We hope you enjoy this episode, and please do take the time to sit down and think about how you can improve your band's communication, because right now, when we're not on the road, this is the best time that you can set aside some time and work on your business rather than working in your business. Something that we didn't discuss in the episode is the 50 50 rule that basically says as much time as you spend on your music, you should also be spending on your business.

So if you spend three hours writing music, spend three hours on your business. If you spend a week writing music or playing music or rehearsing or whatever, then spend another week doing stuff for your business. I hope you're all doing well and stay healthy. But if you find yourself doing a bunch of musical stuff that's awesome. Don't neglect the business side of things. If you have questions, just head on over to Bandhive dot rocks slash group, which will redirect you to our Facebook group and you can ask there, Erin and I, as well as Matt and the other members of the group, will be happy to help you out so you can be prepared for this global pandemic toe end and hit the ground running.

Thanks again for listening. I hope you have an awesome week. We'll be back next Tuesday at 6 a.m. And of course, as always, keep rocking