by Serguey Shinder
In March 2015 we sold out a two hundred and fifty capacity room in a city three hours from home. It remains the best night the band ever had. People sang words back at us that we had recorded in a bedroom, the promoter paid us properly and asked when we were coming back, and we drove home at four in the morning entirely certain that something had started.
We went back fourteen months later. Forty one people came.
Nothing had gone wrong in between. We had put out three tracks, we had posted about all of them, and we had the follower counts to prove that several thousand people had at some point indicated that they liked us. What we did not have, and had never once thought about, was any means of telling a single one of the people in that room in 2015 that we were playing again. Not one email address. Not one phone number. We had a paper sheet at a gig that summer with about thirty names on it, and it lived in the van until it did not.
The promoter had every ticket buyer's address. He was perfectly pleasant about not giving them to us, and he was right on the law and right commercially, because that list was the most valuable thing he owned and we had handed it to him for free by not asking.
Everything we did instead was a request to a platform to please show our post to people who had already told it they wanted to see our posts. Sometimes it did. In 2016 it largely stopped, for reasons that had nothing to do with us and were never explained to anybody, and the several thousand people became a number on a page that did not correspond to anything we could reach.
So the unglamorous work started. A tablet on the merch table with two fields on it. One of us asking, out loud, from the stage, once a night, in a way that felt like begging for the first year. Four hundred and some addresses by the end of 2017, which is a small number and is also four hundred people we could tell about a Tuesday in a room in Manchester without asking anybody's permission. The gigs stopped being a lottery.
I have applied exactly one question to everything since, and it works on customers, on contacts, on former colleagues and on anybody whose good opinion matters to you. If I want to begin the next conversation, can I, by myself, without a third party choosing whether to deliver it. A crowd in front of you is not an audience. It becomes one at the point where you can reach them on purpose, and every night you do not ask is a night you are relying on somebody else's algorithm to remember you.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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