This morning I got to do some farming. Okay, by "farming," I mean this city boy spent maybe an hour or so helping with feeding chickens, moving an outdoor pen, and stacking hay. My band is staying on the family farm of friends who live in rural New Hampshire, and today it's almost hot but for the light breeze that finds its way through the still dead branches of these mid-spring New England woodlands. I sit now in a lawn chair on the gentle slope of a three-acre clearing behind the family home, amidst a circle of debris from last night's grilling of very local sausage.
In the two weeks since I last wrote from the road, we've gigged our way through Georgia, North Carolina, DC, New York, and Boston, and we most recently stayed with TourSleeper founder Dan Bergeron. We had the chance to do an episode with him for our podcast series, The About!.. Podcast, and we talked quite a bit with him on and off mic about TourSleeper's growing ecosystem. More than the finer details and ever improving mechanics of the website, I find myself thinking about the kind of person who participates in something like TourSleeper.
As an independent musician, a huge part of my job is to figure out what kinds of people are likely to provide financial, logistical, and moral support to keep my career going. I'm not a marketing guru, and I'm not especially interested in becoming one, but I have to put some amount of energy into figuring out the difference between a one-time compliment in a bar and an invested supporter. It's always nice to give a randomly assembled group of people a good time, but starting from scratch every night at one of a handful of local clubs with tiny, fixed entertainment budgets is by itself insufficient to build a sustainable career in the arts. The challenge for many of us is that trying to get an enthusiastic listener to provide concrete support feels... well, sleazy.
How do we motivate people who just had a moving experience as a result of our performance to buy a t-shirt or consider supporting via sustained pledges or periodic lodging via a direct patronage platform like TourSleeper or Patreon ? One of the things I've learned by sleeping on the couches and floors of kind strangers is that even in an age of increasing isolation and mass self-aggrandizement, people still crave individual connection. Experienced travelers and travel hosts especially value being helpful and receiving help.
We've stayed with folks on this tour who have hosted hundreds of travelers, and some of them have mentioned wanting the opportunity to host more touring musicians. I think that has to do with the rather uniquely heightened focus on social exchange for which musicians are conditioned. Every performance is a social exchange, and in my opinion the best performers create the richest shared experiences. Enriching social experiences are what non-commercial travel hosting is all about, so it makes sense that experienced travel hosts might develop a particular interest in musicians. The point is, there appear to be enough people out there interested in helping independent artists for a platform like TourSleeper to work. So, as for my original question: How do we motivate people to support? It turns out, we just ask.
Do you participate in TourSleeper? Would you consider it? We'd love to have you.
- Joshua Taylor