I just read a sharp, no-fluff piece on Hypebot titled “How to Promote Live Shows and Tours,” published September 22, 2025. It’s a practical field guide for artists who want more than a nice poster and a prayer.
The core message is simple: mix the modern stuff with the old-school stuff, be specific with your targeting, and keep talking to fans before, during, and after the gig.
The Article’s Big Ideas
- List your dates where fans actually discover gigs. Think Bandsintown and similar tools that feed your events into Spotify and YouTube, plus geo-targeted alerts and a single, consistent ticket link. Translation: meet people where they already are, and keep the path to tickets clean.
- Email is still your engine room. Build your own list, segment by city, and use it every time you announce or roll into town. Free tiers on platforms like Beehiiv, MailerLite, and Mailchimp make it easy to start. Owning that list means you can talk to your day-ones without begging an algorithm.
- Social isn’t just a flyer repost. Short selfie vids, behind-the-scenes bits, ticket giveaways, and polls beat a static square. Sync with venues and promoters so everyone’s pushing the same message, and consider small, localised ad spends when it counts.
- SMS and audio shout-outs help on the home stretch. If you’ve got numbers ethically collected, tools like Community or SuperPhone can nudge fans right before doors. If you’re active on Pandora, their AMP tools even let you drop short audio promos to listeners in target cities.
- Go local like it’s 1999. Pitch street press, blogs, community radio, uni stations, subreddit groups, Discords, and Facebook communities. This isn’t “spray and pray.” It’s human and specific.
- Put real posters in real places. Physical flyers still matter if you give them time to work. Recruit a couple of “band ambassadors” for coffee shops and record stores and thank them with a ticket or some merch.
- Document the shows. Capture soundcheck, van life, crowds, and the little moments. They’re future posts, future reels, sometimes future music videos. Plus, it shows fans you see them.
Treat Each City Like A Micro-Launch
Here’s how I think about it from the trenches in Australia… Every date on a tour is its own campaign. Not bigger. Not smaller. Just focused.
- Timeline, not chaos. Eight weeks out, lock the discovery listings and the single ticket link. Six weeks, soft social run with personality posts, not just posters. Four weeks, first local media taps and venue cross-posting. Two weeks, segment your email by city and send the “we’re coming” note. Final 72 hours, SMS or boosted posts to the suburb radius. After the gig, a thank-you post with a photo of the room and a link to the next date.
- Set a presale goal. Decide the number that makes the night safe, then work backward. If you need 80 presales, what does that require per week, and which levers move fastest in that city? Email list in Perth might be tiny, but the venue’s Facebook page might be strong. Flip your effort accordingly.
- One clear path to tickets. Don’t make people jump fences. Use one ticket link everywhere and keep it near the top of every caption, bio, and event page. Hypebot hammers the unified link idea for a reason. Confused fans bounce.
- Borrow audiences with intent. The opener’s fans, the venue’s list, the local podcast, the coffee shop where your people hang out. It’s not about begging. It’s about trading value. Give them something fun to share, not a graphic with 27 logos.
- Own the relationship. Build your list at the merch desk. Capture emails with a QR code and a raffle for a signed vinyl or a custom song snippet. Social can introduce you. Email and SMS let you keep the conversation going without renting access from a platform every time.
- Make the room feel seen. A 15-second crowd clip with the city name on it does more than a thousand boosted flyers. People want to be part of a moment, not just a transaction. That’s the magic Hypebot points to when it says document the tour as it happens.
Think of your tour like a string of lighthouses on a dark coast. Each one needs to be switched on in time, pointed at the right patch of water, and maintained throughout the night. If you do that, the boats tend to find you.
There’s more detail in the full post. Check out Hypebot’s “How to Promote Live Shows and Tours” here.
