[00:00:00] James: Welcome to episode 181 of the Bandhive Podcast. It is time for the episode of the Bandhive Podcast. My name is James Cross and I help independent artists Tour smart. This week I am joined with V1 the only Matt Ho of Alive in Barcelona. How are you doing today,

[00:00:16] James: Matt?

[00:00:16] Matt: James, I'm doing fantastic. It's a beautiful day here in Colorado. It's sun shiny. supposed to be sixties to seventies today, so it's just absolutely gorgeous. Light breeze. We've had some nice weather these last couple days. It's been typical Colorado. Uh, Fickle weather where we had like 80 degree weather and then snow the next day, and then then like 50 degree weather and then 80 degree weather, and then like rain and wind.

[00:00:40] Matt: And so, you know, the, the springtime here is always a veritable roll of the dice. at alpine climates and, and whatnot. But today is glorious and I could not ask for more beautiful weather. how are things over there on the east side?

[00:00:52] James: Things are good. And I mean, it's gray and in the fifties today, maybe even only the forties, and I did see a couple snow flurries the other day, which is[00:01:00] similar. Saturday it was 80 degrees and perfectly sunny, just a couple little puffs of clouds in the sky.

[00:01:06] James: It was amazing. I went flying, it was so fun. And then Sunday was like, so, so, and yesterday was gray and rainy and I'm just like, Okay, that's fine. Like gray and rainy, but does it have to be cold?

[00:01:18] Matt: Yep. That's right. Just make up your

[00:01:20] James: Couldn't it be at least like 65, but it's in the fifties, so I can definitely relate to that.

[00:01:25] James: And it is gnarly out there.

[00:01:27] Matt: Silver and cold.

[00:01:28] James: a good reference. but it's not silent because you have a bunch of lovely little chicks chirping away next to

[00:01:35] James: you.

[00:01:36] Matt: I do. I

[00:01:36] Matt: have

[00:01:36] Matt: 23 birds that are just, uh, growing right next to me in their brooder. They're almost ready to go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather. it's tons of fun. So if you guys hear any fun lively chirping or uh, cheaps or, uh, little flutters, that's just my birds.

[00:01:51] Matt: don't mind them. they're just my family. you'll hear some cute bird noises throughout the course of this podcast because they're just trying to communicate with me. And that's what today's episode is actually all [00:02:00] about, communication.

[00:02:01] James: absolutely. That is a good segue. I had a segue too, but yours is better. So I'm glad you, you've walked us into this one. It's all about communication, and we're gonna break it up into three distinct parts. The first thing is communication within your band. So this is you talking your band mates, to your team, whether you have staff or if it's just like, Hey, my buddy John does X, Y, Z for us.

[00:02:24] James: Then the second part is communicating with others outside of your band. So that's gonna be like people you're working with, maybe you're booking shows. I hope you're booking shows because a lot of what we talk about on this podcast is how to play shows and not look like a fool. So communicating with talent buyers or promoters.

[00:02:43] James: Another thing to discuss is communicating with fans because we need to always have a professional relationship with our fans for many reasons, one, for not burning bridges, and two, for not being a creep. Because unfortunately a lot of bands seem to fall into that trap.

[00:02:58] James: And then the third thing [00:03:00] is combining the two. Because if your left hand doesn't know what your right hand is doing, you're gonna have problems. so you always wanna make sure that your left hand, the internal communication in your band and the right hand, the external communication with promoters, venues, fans, whoever it is, are working together rather than opposite of each other.

[00:03:20] James: Because that is incredibly important. And Matt, as a perfect example, The last couple weeks here, you haven't been on the podcast, and that's totally fine because we communicate about this. that's always been the policy for the Bandhive Podcast is if there's something that comes up, family first, whether that's family by blood, or family by friendship, whatever it is.

[00:03:41] James: Family first is the thing. obviously we don't have to go into any details here, but having these open channels of communication, I don't think you would be on this show three years later if the first time something happened and you had to take care of your kids or somebody in your family.

[00:03:55] James: I said, well, screw you. Like you're, that's not okay. We have a podcast, no one wants to [00:04:00] work in an environment like that. like you work in a service job or something and your boss says, oh, your car broke down. Too bad. You're getting written up Anyway, it's like, I couldn't control that my car broke down.

[00:04:11] James: Like, or you know, maybe you could with maintenance, but let's say somebody ran into you on the way to work, I'm in the hospital. Too bad. You should have left earlier so you could get outta the hospital and get here on time. That's not how it works. That's not life. Like things happen and you know, sometimes there are people who, seem to happen a lot, but those also tend to be the people who don't communicate well.

[00:04:31] James: And I attribute a huge part of our continued collaboration on this podcast to your communication skills. Matt, like, I think you do a really great job of saying, Hey, can't be there 110% today. So is it okay if I take some time off? And the answer's always, yeah, of course. Why

[00:04:47] Matt: that's right. Oh, and inversely James, you are a great communicator yourself. You do a good job of. Being receptive and, and listening. each and every week before we are doing our podcast, we have a few text messages back and forth to [00:05:00] talk about the topics that we're gonna go over and talk about a start time or talk about if it makes sense for us to record that week two-way street. people aren't communicating and if people aren't flexible, and if people don't have kind of a small backup, then, you know, that leaves for a lot of catastrophe down the road. So, it's a very, very important thing to have communication really in anything that you're doing.

[00:05:20] Matt: And on top of that, you know, communication has, touches of confidence and touches of humility touches of assertiveness and also touches of like learning when and where to shut up. like you were saying, you know, your example of getting in a car accident, that's not a time to get mad at somebody, We as a live in Barcelona, have canceled one show ever.

[00:05:38] Matt: That was because I had bronchitis. There was nothing I could do about it. I was on the verge of getting pneumonia. And it was the only show in our entire time that we've, ever canceled a show. And that was basically a product of, circumstance.

[00:05:53] Matt: Now there's been plenty of shows that we haven't taken like for me, I have three kids. You there's been times when, I think we had a, a [00:06:00] show that was gonna be scheduled for like, the week of my son's birth. that basically said like, no, we have to.

[00:06:07] Matt: Not take this show because it's just going to be too close to when, my son is born. And you know, it was like within seven days of his birthday.

[00:06:15] Matt: So we were like, well, now let's not take the risk. You know, and then he ended up coming early. So it ended up being like two weeks before the show date, we were like, Hey, let's take that show. If, it's still available, we can do two weeks of promotion. It was in our local market, so we figured, hey, why not?

[00:06:30] Matt: And it left us with a little bit more flexibility, but everybody in the band was on the same page and we all knew that that was a possibility. So it was more of a, open-ended consensus to where we, you know, weren't gonna put anything that was family oriented at risk. and we had to move from there.

[00:06:45] Matt: same was true when, Jesse's dad passed away. when that happened, it was kind of like we all kind of silently knew that, there was going to be some type of hiatus we needed to take a step back and say like, okay, things need to be organized there's real life personal things that are happening and changing.[00:07:00] [00:07:00] Matt: So what, can we as supportive friends and family, you know, do for our band mate and how can we be there? And that resulted in like kind of a long hiatus of a really figuring out exactly what it was that we wanted. Uh, we went through like a rebrand at that time and it all stemmed from good communication the ability to humble ourselves around each other and say like, okay, I understand this is what I want, but is this what's best for everyone?

[00:07:25] James: yeah, absolutely. And I think, there's lots of tools that you can use to communicate these things, but ultimately, if you don't have the personal skills of communication and knowing when to talk to people and when to give them space and how to talk to people, that's really important. So I wanna shout out here a great book called Non-Violent Communication.

[00:07:49] James: I read this, uh, about two months ago, I guess. I finished it. It's an amazing book, and I think I've chatted it out on the podcast before. I hope I did. what it talks about is you [00:08:00] can communicate to other people what you have observed, how what you observed makes you feel what you need.

[00:08:07] James: And then a specific request, letting them know basically what you need, but what they can do to satisfy that need for you. And you don't necessarily always need all four parts of this, but that is the basic framework. And by using nonviolent communication, you can really establish better communication, healthier communication with others.

[00:08:29] James: And this goes for anyone in your life. This could be your partner, husband, wife. This could be your kids, this could be people you're working with, or perhaps most importantly, because there are a lot of vans that fall apart due to poor communication. The communication within your band, it also though, applies to yourself.

[00:08:46] James: You can use non-violent communication with yourself in your thoughts. You know, if you have that train of thought and you're like beating up on yourself, you can take a step back and apply non-violent communication to yourself. It's like $12 on Amazon. [00:09:00] I absolutely recommend it. It'll be in the show notes.

[00:09:02] James: It is by Marshall b Rosenberg, I believe something along those lines. It's called Non-violent Communication. So if you wanna check that out, it'll be in the show [email protected] slash 180 1. That's the number 181, and you can need that. Now when it comes to. Communication within the band. There are a few different ways you can do this.

[00:09:23] James: I should clarify too, Matt, you and I usually are on iMessage these days, but originally it was Facebook Messenger. Both are good options. You can use group chats in either one of those apps as well. So my band who, we'll talk about this on a future episode, but yes, I, James Cross, have finally joined a band after years of saying I'll never join a band I'm now in a band, I, I'm the bass player, so I have to stop making bass jokes unless I wanna be

[00:09:48] James: self-deprecating. So yeah, we started in a group chat. And it was on text message because one of our singers is on Android, and I'm going to refrain from calling him the names that I want [00:10:00] to call him right

[00:10:00] James: now because the rest of the band is on iPhone and I live out in the middle of nowhere.

[00:10:06] James: So anytime he sent a video or a picture, would show

[00:10:10] James: up in terrible quality because I have like one bar of connection or maybe not even show up at all. And I would just see that he had sent something and I couldn't load it. So finally I said, guys, we need to move to Facebook.

[00:10:22] James: Is that okay? And everyone said, yeah, that's fine. So now we're on Facebook. I would love to be on iMessage, but Facebook, it is for the time being. So yeah, if all of you have an iPhone except one or two people, don't use text messages, that's not going to be useful for you, especially if somebody's in area with bad service.

[00:10:40] James: I have wifi at home, but wifi calling doesn't support images in text messages. It doesn't support mms if you wanna take it to the next level. Slack is an amazing tool. I love Slack. I use it daily, and it's great for having threaded conversations. You can have different channels for different topics, so you could have one for new [00:11:00] music, you could have one for booking shows and touring.

[00:11:02] James: You could have one for marketing and one for merch. You can have these all split up and then when somebody sends a message, you can reply in a thread within that channel. So it's really versatile. You can do so much with this now. Matt, something you mentioned about Alive in Barcelona, not playing shows.

[00:11:19] James: Well, we use a project management app called project.co for nerves and that's actually the same project management I use for Bandhive as well. So I highly recommend it. If you need project management, which side note, everyone needs project management, that out cuz we're on the free plan for nerves. I have a paid plan for Bandhive just because why not? But Nerves is on the free plan and we in there have a workspace for shows in touring and several things go in there. One, if we book a show that goes in there, but two, there is a calendar view and if anyone is not available for some time, we put that in there.

[00:11:55] James: So for example, one of our singers is about to have his second kid,[00:12:00] his wife is about to have their second kid and we've just blocked out that time and said person is not available. Now we've discussed, Hey, you know what? We can do shows as a three piece because we have two singers. So if one of the singers can't make it, we can do it with just the other singer.

[00:12:15] James: If I can't make it, guess what? All of the bands studio stuff, we use tracks anyway, so just drop in the studio bass and that works. We'd need to record something with covers or not do covers. But if I can't make a show, it's really not an issue. If one of the singers can't make a show, but the other one can, that's probably gonna be fine too.

[00:12:33] James: This is something we've all discussed and said, yeah, we're totally cool with this. The only thing that really would stop us is if our drummer can't make it because it's really tough to play a full set without drums. it just doesn't sound right.

[00:12:46] James: You need those drums. So unless we had somebody else fill in, that's not gonna work. But here's one of the other things. One of our singers is the original drummer of the band. Like he played all the drums in the studio. So theoretically he could do that too. So we are literally [00:13:00] flexible.

[00:13:00] James: As long as we're only down one person, basically, we can make a show happen no matter which one of us is out. We could make it work if we needed to, put somebody else behind the kit, maybe only have one singer, maybe use the bass tracks, whatever it is. We've all kind of said like, yeah, we're cool with this.

[00:13:14] James: We don't care if somebody else gets in on the action. there's even been talk about if the lead guitarist can't make it, I can do the second guitar. Now, I'm not a lead guitarist. I had to rhythm, but two guitars sounds better than one, no matter what. that's just a fact.

[00:13:26] Matt: Left and right. Definitely makes a big, huge difference we have two guitarists, but one of 'em lives you know, on the other side of the country. So whenever we do small shows, he doesn't play with us. So Jesse will backtrack the rhythm and play the lead.

[00:13:39] Matt: know, and when Cameron's there, then we have two live guitarists. But we kind of live in a day and age where you have to be a little bit more modular. Cause life moves at a very quick pace. So how many of you guys have ever gone to see like a band that you love in concert on one tour and then you go see 'em on a different tour and they have a different member?

[00:13:56] Matt: But they haven't made any like, official statements saying, oh [00:14:00] yeah, like we changed members, or blah, blah, blah. This. A lot of the time they haven't changed members a lot of the time. They just have a touring artist. We toured with the band a while back where, you know, I asked him how many members were in the band.

[00:14:09] Matt: He said, oh, 12. But they were touring as a three piece, you and whenever certain members can show up, then they tour, you know, and whenever they can't, they can't. and there's different variations of all of their songs. You know, and they don't even do like backing tracks for some of their other pieces.

[00:14:24] Matt: They just make things a little bit more harmonious live, which is kind of cool. adds a fresh perspective to uh, the live show. But as like an artist and as a business owner, can either say like, oh, business is closed today. Or you can say like, okay, so how do we get around this, hurdle?

[00:14:39] Matt: And, you know, when you're doing things DIY independently, the big thing is, is like you have to know for sure how things are gonna be. there was one time I was out of the country and we were starting a tour. I was traveling with my family and I knew that I was gonna be missing like, the first few days of tour.

[00:14:56] Matt: So my band mates reached out to a couple of the bands in our [00:15:00] local scene to see if anybody was like, available to basically fill in my parts. And everybody that tried out was just apparently horrible. And nobody could sing any of the parts. And so, We ended up having to reach out to our label, who then reached out to like another band.

[00:15:15] Matt: And then before we knew it, Kevin Erta from it lives at Breeze was going to be filling in for me to do about a week's worth of shows. And what's awesome about that is that it butted into this great friendship with Kevin. know, now when we travel to Florida you know, really just like the east coast in general, there's a good chance of him being out and about amongst those people.

[00:15:35] Matt: And uh, Kevin's a ton of fun. He's a great personality. And so it's like not only did we have the ability to kind of adapt out of the situation and create. a path moving forward, but we also developed a good quality relationship with Kevin and really with Kevin's business. So not only was it a good business decision, but it was a good personal decision because it enriched all of our lives, Kevin included.

[00:15:59] Matt: be [00:16:00] afraid to invite those kind of opportunities in your life just because it's like out of the ordinary, reality, it's much more ordinary than you think. I met my wife at Riot Fest in Chicago years and years and years and years ago. no doubt was playing.

[00:16:13] Matt: And I was like, oh, I've never seen no doubt live. This is cool. And they played through their entire first song, and then Gwen Stefani goes, guess what? That's Tom DeLong on keyboard. And everybody just went crazy. But no, like, nobody was even paying attention. It was like, holy cow, like Blink 180 2 is up there playing keys for Gwen Stefani right now.

[00:16:29] Matt: you know, these are relationships that only are nurtured through the adaptability and communication aspects of being in a band. You know, Tom DeLong could not have played keys for no doubt without communication. No doubt. inversely, all of the band members of No Doubt would not have said, yeah, Tom can play without good quality communication between them.

[00:16:48] Matt: You know, especially when you're, playing a show of that caliber. I think it was the first show that System of A Down had played in like 10 years. And it was the reunion show for nwa. And it [00:17:00] was, I think the last scheduled tour. For Motorhead.

[00:17:06] Matt: And everybody knew that Lemi was, getting old. was when people had started talking about him no longer moving around on stage, which is something that he was known for. And so this Riot Fest was massive.

[00:17:17] Matt: And you know, you're talking about so many working parts of production, just go talk to a production manager and they are like the most stressed, wound up people you've like ever met in your entire life because they're literally centrally planning a city that moves.

[00:17:32] Matt: it's absolutely insane. people will really never understand the, capacity that things like Warp Tour. Really achieved, because they only saw them from the outside looking in. Warp Tour is one of the most insane things that has ever occurred, ever. It is a rolling city with, workout classes and psychiatrists and doctors and, field trips and fun times with bands.

[00:17:56] Matt: And I could not tell you all of the different types of things that you can [00:18:00] go and do on Warp Tour it's like having high school where every single thing is an elective and only thing that's set in stone is that there's going to be a lot of chaos. you know, it's like maybe you get a shower, maybe you don't, maybe you make it to the bathroom before the concert goers.

[00:18:15] Matt: Do you know, maybe you don't, maybe your bus gets stranded on the side of the road cuz you have no air conditioning and it starts to explode. we've all been there, and that's what's really, really crazy is like these, production levels could not happen without absolutely insane amounts of communication.

[00:18:31] Matt: I mean, we, even one year at Warped Tour had somebody steal one of our shirt designs and was selling our shirt design inside the walls even after Warp Tour. we were actually going to stop selling the shirt and then we found people inside of Warped Tour selling the shirt.

[00:18:42] Matt: Literally had our band logo on it and everything.

[00:18:44] James: So it wasn't like they'd ripped off the design and took it for

[00:18:46] James: their band. They were just

[00:18:47] James: ripping you guys

[00:18:48] Matt: hundred percent. There, the only thing that they did you know, our band name was called the Persevering Promise at the time. And so it had the peepee inside of a heart with an arrow through it, and they just took out the peepee, so it still had the heart with arrow through it, which was like part of our [00:19:00] branding.

[00:19:00] Matt: Which obviously is a pretty common symbol and you know, anybody can use that. But it was 100% the same shirt, same font, same letter, same color, same everything, same design. They bought it, they sent it to their printer, their printer a screen and shipped it out. even amongst all that chaos, we communicated to Lisa and Lisa herself, walked out to that vendor and shut him down.

[00:19:17] Matt: and that's. Only attainable with good communication, we basically had somebody that was actively taking money out of our pocket. on top of that, we were trying to do things as respectfully as we possibly could for the Warp tour people, because we wanted to make their lives easier.

[00:19:32] Matt: over our course of seven years of Warp Tour, we developed some amazing relationships with a lot of people,

[00:19:35] James: Sully and

[00:19:36] James: his crew of like two or three other security guys.

[00:19:39] Matt: yeah. And all of those guys, I mean, you know, the first year that we were out there, it was like we were trying to make sure that we were staying out of their way and that we weren't getting in trouble with them.

[00:19:46] Matt: And then by the last year, it was like, mean, I sat there and smoked a cigar with Soly, the relationships that you build all based off of communication. And they were just simple things like, oh, the gates are open, okay, I need to stop selling to these kids at the flood gates because the Warp Tour securities goal is to [00:20:00] get these kids in the show so they can go see their favorite bands.

[00:20:02] Matt: And anybody out here that is stopping them to sell stuff is then hindering the Warp Tour goal. So there was kind of an unspoken thing amongst people that sold in the morning that like, once the floodgates were open, it was kind of just better for you to help the kids get inside the concert, because that's what really mattered.

[00:20:17] Matt: That was the good communication. And consequently, because I was never at this roadblock in their life. whatever they needed from us, they would get from us. could really, really feel how thick the communication was.

[00:20:29] Matt: Cuz when we would park in the band parking, even though we didn't have a band number, I still remember one time we were in St. Louis parked by this little, this thing of water that you're not supposed to swim in. there, can't remember his name, but he always, he's responsible for parking.

[00:20:41] Matt: One of the most intense jobs in all of Warp Tour, trying to get, you know, 120 buses to park in a designated area, one by one. And so we go and we park in our area, and then he rolls up on his little Raptor car and he's like, oh, it's just you guys, okay. he is like, oh, just, one of the other bands.

[00:20:57] Matt: Mentioned that there were some kids like drinking out at their [00:21:00] van at, at, you know, seven o'clock in the morning. And when they saw it was us, they were like, oh, it's just you guys. So obviously, like they had seen us, they knew us, you know, they recognized our faces, they knew that we were there as a part of the tour, and they and more importantly, they knew that we doing anything nefarious.

[00:21:15] Matt: And ultimately we were there to help them. obviously the bands had been communicating with Warp Tour, security Warp, tour security rolled up on us and they communicated with us, and then from there it was like, whatever we have to do to make sure that we're not stepping on any toes.

[00:21:30] Matt: Let's do that. And basically, that is all grounded in communication. Lisa knew that we were there every day, which, at first, there wasn't good communication there, but once. the Warp Tour security kind of knew who the, what they call line bands, the people who follow Warp Tour promote they're not officially a part of Warp Tour, but they are an integral part of Warp Tour.

[00:21:50] Matt: And they kind of make a mental tally of all these people that are coming. Well, at first it started as we're following Warped Tour, we're selling, we're promoting, and then before you know it, you [00:22:00] know, I'm in North Carolina and solely is rolling up on me in his Raptor car and he says, Hey guys. The last couple of dates we've had high distributions of M D M A being distributed amongst kids Molly Drugs.

[00:22:14] Matt: There's a lot of EDM artists that have showed up and we're wondering if basically these EDM artists are selling drugs to these kids at Warp Tour. Not only is this a blatant, horrible, terrible thing to do, but also. there is not a more dangerous sitting for you to be doing something stupid like that.

[00:22:29] Matt: It's like you're in a hundred degree weather and you're gonna go take something that like, turns your body into overdrive and sweats out all your water and then you're gonna dance in the sun. I mean, it's just like, you wanna go to the hospital. That's a good way to do it. So it was like a very big concern, at the start of Warp Tour, we were just kids. We were just following, we were learning, trying to communicate. By the end of Warp Tour, the heads of Warp Tour security were coming up to us, to deputize us to help find out where these drugs are coming from, And so like, the power of communication can get you really, really far, they say that what, you know, you in the door, but who you know gets you to the right [00:23:00] floor.

[00:23:00] Matt: Very, very true. you can walk in the door and, and you can be seen in this scenario, but it's your skills as a communicator, and it's your skills your amount of humility really, that's like what the math formula is. It's like humility times communication equals opportunity.

[00:23:15] Matt: if you can really take that formula and find the application of those variables in your life, what does that communication look like? What does, you know, that humility look like, and what are the right amounts of intensity and assertiveness that I need to bring to this equation?

[00:23:31] Matt: You learn that, then you're, then you're gonna start developing a network of people who are all actively working towards you, and that it's easy to communicate with. it's really easy to find people that you don't communicate well with. you feel anxious about them.

[00:23:42] Matt: the anxiety gets really thick when you have to tell 'em something that like, they don't want to hear, It's like nobody wants to give somebody bad news, but somebody that is hum and a good communicator like you, James, if I tell you some bad news that it's like, Hey man, I can't make a podcast this week.

[00:23:56] Matt: That's not good news. And generally if I can't make a podcast, it's because I've received bad news.[00:24:00] But instead of you saying, oh, you should have left 10 minutes earlier, so you didn't get in the car accident, you say, no worries bro, we'll get it taken care of. Let me know if you need to talk. And you know what, I will always, always, always do whatever I can to make the podcast because the bottom line is, is we have humility and good communication and you are able to adapt to my family's needs.

[00:24:21] Matt: that is a very important connection for me to have just in life because I don't want to work with people who don't put my family above their own wants. and the same goes with my band. turned down massive opportunities from people because those people sucked. And that's all there is to it. one of the first times we were, gonna get signed as a live in Barcelona, we turned down most of what the guy had to offer us because of his just simple little things. Like he couldn't advance a show or like the headliner dropped off the bill, he didn't tell us, for us, those are the types of things that show a severe amount of disrespect and poor communication.

[00:24:56] Matt: if I'm the product, if I'm the one supposed to be making you money, then [00:25:00] I need to know what's going on with the gears inside the machine. You can't tell me, oh, this big headliner's coming and you guys are gonna be direct support.

[00:25:06] Matt: And then that changes. Oh, well now, now that big headliner's not coming. Now it's somebody's small, now it's a local show, blah, blah, blah. This. It's like, well, our entire decision was based off of, you know, who this headliner was because this headliner was gonna bring in. Big money or whatever, or, or a lot of people.

[00:25:21] Matt: Well, when those things change, the variables change. And the band deserves to know that. The members deserve to know that. The families deserve to know that. And that all comes from communication. You need to have band meetings all the time. Band meetings are important, especially when you're on tour. If you're touring, you should have a band meeting in the morning because you need to go over the important details.

[00:25:40] Matt: Everybody needs to know when they play. You generally have a one sheet in your tour bus, if your tour manager is good, it'll tell you what time loading is. It'll tell you what time you play. It'll tell you what time bus call is. It'll tell you some points of interest. And it might even, you include a couple other tidbits, Robin on Bennett is a fantastic, tour manager. He loves to include. [00:26:00] Dietary restriction as pieces of information. Tons of people in the music industry have different dietary restrictions. Some people are carnivore, some people are keto, some people are vegan, some people are vegetarians. Some people are complete.

[00:26:11] Matt: You know, they have no dietary restrictions whatsoever. That's a very wide spectrum. he incorporates things that kind of cater to everybody. And so nobody has to say, oh, I'm in this new city now I have to find a vegan restaurant. oh, well actually there's one right up there.

[00:26:24] Matt: or there's two up on the list. Maybe you can go take a look there. were things where that were a lot more important in years past. Now there's a lot more applications and things like that where, you know, you as an independent person, you James, I'm sure you never have problems finding food when you go anywhere anymore.

[00:26:36] James: Yeah, it's so easy

[00:26:38] Matt: now there's enough vegan restaurants everywhere that it's like you can go out and, and do that. Well, Robin Honda starts by putting his best foot forward. he's a production manager, so he's always constantly getting questions and orchestrating people getting water and blah, blah, blah, this and, payouts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:26:51] Matt: And he might not have all the information at all the time. And so before the tour started, he went through and he found a few things so that he could alleviate some of the communicative stress[00:27:00] of, trying to address a bunch of different people. And there's even more stress if you are the whole tour manager.

[00:27:05] Matt: if you manage just the band, that's stressful. If you manage the band and the whole tour. the amount of chaos there is just like, you need to be a high functioning, hyperactive, good communicator you have to have good both qualities of humility.

[00:27:17] Matt: And you also, some of the time have to kind of like be a dick. Like people who are, are big production managers. They definitely have an edge about them. And that's probably from years and years and years and years of having to fight for like, what they deserve. so don't be afraid to be assertive and to be yourself.

[00:27:33] Matt: it is not wrong for you to express what you need out of something. the idea is to find a win-win situation for everyone. And you do that with good communication. You do that by being open and honest. If I say I have to make a hundred dollars a day, and you say, I can only pay you $80 a day, Then guess what?

[00:27:52] Matt: I cannot do that. It's just basic math. I'm mathematically planning to obsolete myself. I am unsustainable at that point. [00:28:00] So you have to have good communication. And so that way all of the variables line up. You have to say, I need a hundred dollars a day, and if that doesn't work, then it's okay and it doesn't work.

[00:28:09] Matt: And then that promoter or that production manager or whoever you're working with the ball's in their court. Then, then they can say, Hey, I can pay you a little bit more money and I'll, take the $20 a day cut or whatever. They will decide if economically sound for them.

[00:28:21] Matt: But if they look at the bottom dollar and they say, Hey, if I pay this guy a hundred dollars a day, then I lose money. And if I say, Hey, if I make $80 a day, then I lose money, then that's a win-Lose one person wins, the other person loses. And that's not what you want to do. You either need to find a way to make the situation better by communicating you also need to not be afraid to say no.

[00:28:39] Matt: That's another really, really important part of every equation Just say no when things don't work. That's okay.

[00:28:46] James: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is an amazing framework of how to handle people in general, how to work with people, and I love that you said both knowing when to say no and knowing when Sometimes you might need to be a [00:29:00] dick, like there are times when you will have to do that. For example, the promoter or the venue is trying not to pay you, that's when you put your foot down, they've already burned that bridge.

[00:29:10] James: You can go ahead and say, Nope, we're taking what we were promised, we're not leaving until we get this. We need to be paid for this. This is what the agreed upon deal was. Now when it comes to communicating with others, Matt, I think you did a great overview of how to communicate with people From a type of

[00:29:26] James: communication standpoint, it's like how you talk to them. But there are a few things that I wanna point out here. And the first thing is, when you're working with people in advance, you need to send timely responses. If you're the band that takes a week or more to reply to an email, you are just gonna get pushed to the bottom of the pile. If somebody's trying to advance a show with you, get back to them within 24 to 48 hours tops, because this is the kind of thing they're trying to make your show better and you're not doing yourself any favors by taking a week and a half to reply to that [00:30:00] email until the show's like two days out. Now, when it comes to the tools that you can use personally for email, I'm a huge fan of Google Workspace.

[00:30:07] James: I use Google Workspace so much, and it's basically all Google Workspace is is Google email, so Gmail. For businesses and you can get a custom domain, so like I have James Bandhive.rocks, that comes with Google Sheets, it comes with Google Docs, it comes with Gmail, all of this stuff built in, but it's linked to a specific account.

[00:30:29] James: So I have my personal email, which is just a free Gmail, and that has all the Google Docs, Google Sheets, all that. And then I have a separate account for Bandhive. And for my business stuff, it makes it so easy to have that separation of, here's my personal stuff, my expenses for flights, They get logged over there. If I go on vacation and I put together a budget, because I can't go on vacation without a budget cuz I'm a tour manager that goes in there. But if I do something for Bandhive that goes in the Bandhive account, it's all [00:31:00] separate and it's so worth it. It's like $6 a month for Google Workspace, the starter plan. That has everything I need. So why should I pay more? The next thing is, help wise, this is an inbox. It connects with Google Workspace, but also plenty of other email providers and lets you manage emails As a team. You can set up rules to have different people reply based on who it comes from or what email address it gets sent to.

[00:31:25] James: But you can all collaborate. It's basically a ticketing system, but it also works really well for musicians. Let's say you have one email address, but booking stuff goes to one person, merch stuff goes to another person. You can just look at this and then assign it to that person. Within help wise, it's a really great tool. On that note, setting up autoresponder on your email is so incredibly important. So for example, if somebody emails you about merch, you can set up an alias within Workspace for your merch store. So it's like [email protected]. And when somebody [00:32:00] emails that specific address, you can set up help wise to reply with some FAQs about the merch store, or if you're on tour saying, Hey, we're on tour right now.

[00:32:10] James: Thanks for asking. We will send out your merch on this date when we return. You can set up all kinds of things like that. You have one for booking that says, Hey, right now we're not doing any booking outside of this region. So if you're outside of this region, sorry, we're not gonna book something with you unless the offer's really good.

[00:32:28] James: We'll get back to you, probably gonna be a no. Or you can say, Hey, we're not booking shows during this timeframe because our singer's having a kid. So if it's within this timeframe, apologies, it's already a no. You can do all kinds of stuff like that and you still want to reply to the person individually thanking them for the interest.

[00:32:47] James: But this way if it takes you a day or two to get to that email, they already know it's a no and they're not waiting on you to get back to them. Just make sure that you turn these off if it's something like that, because then you know those [00:33:00] dates pass and your autoresponder's still saying, Hey, we're not booking any shows right now.

[00:33:03] James: It's like, now you're not

[00:33:05] James: gonna get any shows cuz you had that autoresponder going. So make sure you put in specific dates. The next thing that I would advocate for is on social media using some kind of unified inbox tool. Radar does this. They're actually a scheduling and unified inbox tool, which I think is really cool.

[00:33:22] James: And all of these apps will be linked in the show notes at Bandhive dot rock slash 180 1, just like the book we mentioned earlier. But you can use this tool to check inboxes from various social media accounts so you don't have to go into each app individually and check them. it let's you schedule the posts as well.

[00:33:38] James: So that is another plus. The next thing. Templates so important. I use templates for so much stuff in my business and in my personal life. not gonna lie, I have a little happy birthday template for Facebook birthdays. I literally like, I look at the list and I type in slash H B D a little window pops up and says, what's the person's name?

[00:33:59] James: And I [00:34:00] type in their name and I hit enter and then it pops up. Do you wanna say anything else? And I can either leave it blank or I can say, hope it's rad, have a blast with a little TDA emoji. Or keep rocking with a metal emoji. And I just choose one of those. And if I wanna say anything else, I can do that too. I enter that template and then do that. But this way I'm not posting the same thing for every single person. It's personalized to them. But it takes me like two seconds instead of 20 seconds. And guess what? You have as many Facebook friends as I do sometimes. I have days where there's like five to 10

[00:34:30] James: people with birthdays,

[00:34:31] James: so I can do that all in.

[00:34:33] James: A minute or less rather than like five to 10 minutes when I'm trying to type something up for each one of them. And you know, from like my closest friends, they still get a personalized happy birthday wish,

[00:34:42] Matt: but the rest of you don't.

[00:34:44] James: so now everyone knows if I've ever wished you,

[00:34:48] James: birthday on Facebook and it said keep rocking that, that's a template.

[00:34:52] James: I'm so sorry,

[00:34:53] James: I do wish you a happy

[00:34:54] James: birthday.

[00:34:55] Matt: only worth two seconds of James time. Not 20. [00:35:00] James has a lot of fires to put out.

[00:35:02] James: I do. Too many, too many.

[00:35:04] Matt: He's always putting out my

[00:35:05] Matt: fires.

[00:35:06] James: I gotta put out your hair cuz it's Fire Red.

[00:35:08] Matt: There's a lot of it too. We should

[00:35:10] Matt: just change this to the long hair Podcast. Long hair, don't care.

[00:35:13] James: the Long Hair Podcast presented by Bandhive. anyway, the app I use for that I should say some, Apps. Some tools like Gmail, you can set up templates in Gmail, it's called a canned response. You can do the same in Instagram on a business account where you type in uh, a certain combination and that works, but it's not customizable. So I use this app called Type Desk, which will also be in the show [email protected] slash 180 1. And that's how I do these customizable templates. It's really great. It works on any website and in pretty much any app on your computer. You can do it on your phone too. It's a little more cumbersome cuz you kind of have to like copy paste, but still, if you have a lot to write, it's really effective.

[00:35:57] James: I also, I use Alfred on my [00:36:00] Mac, which gives me little snippets they call it. And that's what I used to use before type desk. And then I would just replace information like I had a snippet for. When we schedule a new podcast episode, I email our guest and I paste in all the links they need. So I'd use the snippet for that.

[00:36:15] James: Now I use that in type desk, but I still use Alfred snippets for certain things. Like if I want to give somebody my email, I just type in the Tilda key, which is the one to the left of the one on a US keyboard, and then J mail. And that puts in my whole email. I have one that does site. If I do till the site, it puts in https Bandhive.rocks.

[00:36:38] James: And then I can put in our episode number if I want. I have one for our podcast link, which is, better.band/listen just type in til the listen all of these things pop up. So if I wanna share links to somebody, that's super easy. I do the same thing for like affiliate links.

[00:36:53] James: If I wanna link somebody to a tool and I have an affiliate link, which is never. Easy to remember cuz it's like, [00:37:00] tool name.com/ab three Z 4 9 25, whatever the code is. Like that's unique to Bandhive. I don't remember that. So I have a snippet for it. That way I don't have to go look through this list of affiliate links.

[00:37:15] James: I can just be like, oh, that's this tool, Tilda tool name, and it links to that. It makes life so easy. So for these things where I don't need customization, snippets are really easy, but if you need customization, type desk is absolutely the way to go and it's so easy. And honestly, I used Type Desk as a lifetime deal, so I paid once for it. I don't know what it costs. they might even have a free plan. If they do, it's so worth it. But even if you have to pay for it, I think it's worth it. The next thing that templates help you with, but also applies to everything you do in your band's business is on brand communication.

[00:37:48] James: If you have a vibe for your band, your communication with your fans

[00:37:53] James: should match this. Maybe that's not quite appropriate for stuff with people you're working with. You might not want [00:38:00] to approach a venue the same way you approach your fans. You do wanna have some personality in it, but if you have like this big, egotistical, rockstar attitude and that's your public brand, you don't want that to be how you communicate with people you're working with.

[00:38:13] James: And a great example of this, in my opinion, is sick puppies on stage and this is their original singer Shim. He was like the biggest, baddest, meanest, rockstar around. And he would say stuff like, thank you so much. Like, we're here cuz you're here, blah, blah, blah. But if they wanted you to jump, it was an order.

[00:38:30] James: It was not like, all right everybody, let's jump on this one. It was like, all right, now I better see every single one of y'all jumping for this

[00:38:37] James: next song. Or else it was this like gruff, rockstar attitude. But I met him once. Nicest dude ever in person. Now I have no idea how he was to the people he worked with, but when you meet him, he's totally different from what he does on stage.

[00:38:51] James: But their social media back in the day matched their onstage branding because that's the vibe that they were going for. That was their brand.[00:39:00] So if you're creating these templates, sure to do this. And another great example, which I love this company, they're called Pirate Ship. And what they do is get you cheaper rates on U S P S and u P s shipping if you're in the us. Everything they do is branded like a pirate. So if you hit up their chat agents, they will talk to you like a pirate. It is the coolest thing ever. I'm not talking about like the robots. The robots are obviously pirate themed as well, but even they're like, chat agents are like, oh, hok, maybe hope you have a great day.

[00:39:32] James: Are you have a good time. their chat agents are also super helpful, but it's just entertaining. It's not just like another boring chat

[00:39:40] James: agent from like at and t or something. It's like an actual helpful human being

[00:39:45] James: who is speaking with incredible branding. It's so cool. Now on that note, we were talking about shim, like having that rockstar persona on stage, being polite is so important. If you're not polite with the people you're working with, it's such a [00:40:00] pain. So just to wrap things up, kind of, Matt, we wanted to talk about combining the two, the internal communication and the external communication.

[00:40:07] James: So I've got a couple stories to share here. I have a time crunch. You have a time crunch. So we're gonna wrap this up. The first one is last week I recorded, this episode on Wednesday. And then Thursday I worked a show, and this is last week as of whenever we're recording this.

[00:40:21] James: April 19th. This is coming out on like May 16th or something. Let's, yeah. May 16th. So by the time you hear this, it's like a month and a half ago, one of the bands on the show didn't reply to my advanced email for over a week. I took like two or three follow-ups to finally get a response. And they agreed in email to share a drum kit. The opener was bringing drums, and like, yeah, that's fine. So the show is going on and after the second band, all of a sudden I see the drum kit getting torn down. Like, Hey, wait, what's going on? And they're like, oh, the other band has their drums.

[00:40:49] James: I'm like, no, they don't. so I found the drummer and talked to him and at first he was polite about it and I was like, well, your singer said that would share [00:41:00] drums. The singer never told him that. So I was like, well, let's go talk to the singer. The singer wasn't even there like he was outside smoking or something.

[00:41:06] James: I don't know what, but he wasn't there. So thankfully I was like, you know what? The second band played 15 minutes of a 30 minute set. They're done early. Like we can go ahead and switch your kit. But after the show I talked to them, I said, Hey, drummer, singer, like thank you for playing. This was really cool.

[00:41:22] James: You guys sounded great. Just a heads up, you do need to communicate within the band cuz you told me, singer, that you're down to share a kit. And you didn't tell that to the drummer. So that caused this miscommunication. And I'm totally fine to switch out a kit that doesn't bother me if I'm planning for it.

[00:41:38] James: So if you had just said, Hey, we're not down with that, I would've thought, okay, cool. We're switching the kit after the second band. Let me build in a couple extra minutes to the changeover time on the schedule. And they were both like so apologetic about it. Like the drummer had kind of been a jerk at first. And they both basically were like, oh yeah, like we messed that up. Or, so I'm like, yeah, that's like, it's no worries. We had time so we made it work. But if you say one thing, you need to make sure [00:42:00] everyone's on the same page cuz I'm fine. Like if you say no, we can't share, or we don't wanna share, we

[00:42:05] James: can work with that, but we need to have this plan in advance.

[00:42:08] James: Especially because this drummer didn't tell anyone he had a five piece kit. So now I had to go back into the Mic Locker, which I hours ago, and get another mic for his third Tom. Now, to be honest, I wish we'd used that kit, the whole show, cause it sounded way better than the kit the opener brought. But the thing was

[00:42:27] James: communication

[00:42:28] James: and then the opening band on that show, they showed up with two base cabs and each base cab had two 15 inch speakers in it. And as they're loading it in, I was like, you're not gonna need the second one. Our PA is plenty powerful. And they just kinda laughed and kept going.

[00:42:44] James: I'm just like, okay. So then during line check, I had to make them turn it down more and more and more. I even like said, don't even plug in the second one. And they said, well, we like to have the AMP driven. I'm like, Okay. It's gonna be less driven

[00:42:56] James: if you're using both, cuz you're gonna turn it down more. And it [00:43:00] was still difficult to get a good mix on them because it was still so loud. Even at like a quarter of the volume that the amp originally was. And let me tell you, that room has some issues with base

[00:43:10] Matt: So did they have two fifteens and eight tens?

[00:43:13] James: No, no. They had, 2 2

[00:43:15] James: 15 cabs.

[00:43:16] Matt: wow.

[00:43:17] Matt: four fifteens. Oh my

[00:43:18] Matt: gosh.

[00:43:19] James: like they literally had it on the side. And then the second one on the side on top,

[00:43:23] James: it's like, you realize this is made to be vertical. So it's one stack, like a 15 and a 15 above it. And then the guitarist had like a, pv, I wanna say 65 0 5,

[00:43:32] James: one of the

[00:43:33] James: metal pee things is on top of a Marshall cab. So anyway, if you want to hear a list of 16 things that will upset your sound engineer, go to Bandhive.rocks/ 180. That's the number 180. I don't know the title of that yet cause I haven't gotten the edits back. I haven't made the title, but in that episode I cover 16 things you can do to annoy the sound engineer and collectively the opener and the headliner of this [00:44:00] show.

[00:44:00] James: The middle band was fine. I've known the middle band for years. They were super chill and they're just like, we know James. We trust him like he's gonna do right by us. No issues with them whatsoever. But the opener and the headliner together broke at least eight of those things that annoy the sound engineer.

[00:44:16] James: And I've never had, sometimes one or two of those things happens at a show and it's like, yeah, whatever. At this show they literally did at least eight of them and I was just like, I recorded this yesterday. How are they now doing so many of the things on this list, this is ridiculous. So to sum things up, have good communication within your band.

[00:44:32] James: Have good communication with others outside of your band. And when you combine these two, you need to make sure that the communication from outside your band matches the communication inside your band. So your left hand matches

[00:44:45] James: your right hand.

[00:44:46] Matt: exactly right, guys. We talk about communication a lot because humility times communication equals opportunity. And in a world where opportunity only knocks once, communication is the most important part [00:45:00] of the equation.

[00:45:00] James: that does it for this episode of the Bandhive Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening. I really appreciate it, and I hope that this episode has given you some insights into how you can effectively communicate both within your band and with others, and can combine those two aspects.

[00:45:15] James: Please, please, please just communicate well. It is so important for your career. It is so important for your band, and if you can't communicate, you're going to run into problems and your career probably won't progress as well as you'd like it to. So Take this episode to heart.

[00:45:31] James: Communicate to the best of your abilities and always strive to improve those abilities. So over time, you will become an expert communicator. we'll be back with another brand new episode of the Bandhive Podcast next Tuesday at 6:00 AM Eastern, right here in your favorite podcast app. Until then, I hope you have a great week. Stay safe, and of course, as always, keep rocking.