Have you ever dreamt of performing your music on stage, captivating audiences, and getting paid to do what you love? While the journey to becoming a professional musician takes dedication and hard work, open mics offer a powerful and often overlooked advantage: they can be the springboard that launches your career. David Craver, the man behind the Open Mic Network, highlights Open Mic as a stepping stone to paid gigs by emphasizing the advantage you get from the platform. He explains how the platform connects you with potential fans, building a fanbase. There is more to just providing networking opportunities; join David Craver in this episode to learn more. So, are you ready to unlock your potential and take your music career to the next level? Embrace the open mic advantage and get ready to transform your passion into a thriving musical journey!

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The Open Mic Advantage: Your Guide To Getting Gigs With David Craver

The Open Mic Network

I am excited to be here with David Craver from the Open Mic Network. I’m excited to talk about this because I met David and I was like, “I need to get this information out to our audience.” I’m always saying to my students and anybody who asks, “Where can I get some good practice before I try to book gigs and stuff like that?” I’m like, “Open mics are so great for that,” and a lot of people don’t know where to find them. This is going to be a good conversation. First, before we get into that, I would love to have you, David, let everybody know your backstory. I know you’re a musician, so how did you get involved in music? What made you decide to start the Open Mic Network, which has become a big thing? How did that all start?

I’m more than happy to share my little story. Brie, thank you so much for having me on the show, not just a show. I’ve been a musical family. My father was a star on Broadway in the ‘50s. My mother was on the Perry Como Show for six years as a singer. It was the New York thing. They were both professional entertainers their whole life. That’s what they did.

After she left television, my mom was a vocal coach for 40 years. You would think that would shove me right into being a professional musician. No, I stumbled onto guitar at eighteen and played in the backyard like everybody else. At 35, I had some life-changing things and some people I was living with left, like my wife. It opened up some time and I started playing in an open mic and I was like, “This is amazing.”

People, we’re all like-minded and we can play the same songs. I was having the time of my life. That ran from the summer because it was an outdoor thing at a coffee shop. I was driving 35 to 40 minutes to get to the thing. I showed up one day and it was cold and they said, “We’re not doing it anymore. It’s done.” I’m like, “No. What do we do?” Immediately, the next day, here in Georgia, I went to the closest bar to my house and said, “I need to run an open mic and it needs to be here. I want to do it on Tuesday.” The British guy looked at me and he said one thing. He goes, “What if you suck?” I said, “I got an answer.”

I went and got a cassette out of my car and I handed it to him. I said, “This is me playing some songs and if I suck, don’t call. I don’t need the feedback. If you don’t like me, just don’t.” I hadn’t played out anywhere. All I had done was attend an open mic and all I wanted to do was run an open mic. He said, “You don’t suck. Come on back.” I ran an open mic for three years, every Tuesday. It was wildly successful and I was having the time of my life because I had a day job. At the same time, I lost the day job and they sold the bar and I didn’t have anything. I had no income at all.

The weirdest thing ever, if you ever worked with restaurants or bar owners, they’re not real outgoing. You have to go to them to get them to do anything. I had 3 bar owners within 2 days call me and say, “We hear you’re not doing that open mic anymore. Why don’t you come over here and do it?” I’m like, “Okay.” I doubled the price and I said, “I’ll do you Monday, you Tuesday and you Wednesday.” All of a sudden, I’m like, “This could be a business. I’m making more money now.”

I wasn’t killing it, but I could pay the mortgage. All of a sudden, I started thinking about open mics as a business. From that, I grew Open Mic Atlanta and then decided that it could work here. I could do it in drivable cities. I did it in Charlotte and Birmingham. When I say do it, at one point, I think we had 40 live music open mics running in the 3 cities. I had free commercials on the local classic rock station by putting together a deal where we would promote Budweiser in the bars for free if they would buy more radio spots.

That buy that I orchestrated gave me free spots. I went to the bars and said, “If you bring in our open mic, then you get to have your bar mentioned in commercials on the radio. Do you know what it costs at radio spots?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “All you got to do is give me $200 for an open mic and you get free radio spots.” The guy’s like, “Yeah.” It wasn’t hard to sell to bar owners.

That blew up and then we decided to try another model where, basically, we have 85 markets and we have the domain name, Open Mic, then the city name.com. Instead of having one domain, you come and choose your city. We have OpenMicNewYork.com, also for Boston, Chicago, LA, Miami, Orange County you name it.

I’m guessing you don’t have openmicranchocucamongacalifornia.com.

No. San Diego.

It’s all Inland Empire, maybe.

I know it well. I drive through the Inland Empire to get to my friend’s house up in the mountains there. We got all these domains and I started letting everybody in the world promote their own open mics on our websites. If you had an open mic in San Diego, you could go on to OpenMicSanDiego.com, submit all your information, and you’re on there for free. With that, I got lots and lots of people coming to these websites looking for open mics.

From that, they would say, “I want to be inside the tribe. I want to join the Open Mic Network.” I’ve got about 80,000 musicians on our email list that are avid musician hobbyists and people that use open mics for a wide variety of things. They’re all in our little world. That’s how I came to be the grand poobah of all things, open mics.

In my opinion, like most good businesses, you saw a need and you filled it. At first, it was you were interested in it, then you saw a need and then you got scrappy. You figured out how to do the whole thing with the radio ads, which was super smart. You’re like, “There’s got to be a need for these other places.” You expanded. This is how any good business starts, I think. What is your business model? I’m curious, how do you actually make money with the network?

Everything we do for musicians and hosts, people that run open mics, is free. I front all the cost of hosting 85 websites and having a, a robust email service. We pay fees for jot forms so that people can sign up in advance for the open mics. All these things cost money. In order to offset that cost and hopefully make a couple of shekels in profit, which is what business is all about, I do like to occasionally have a meal, it’s crazy that way, I like to eat, there’s two main things. One is because we have so many musicians coming to our websites, we have eyeballs. We combine banner ads and we also have an app, which I’ll tell you about, and then email blasts, and then we sell sponsorship.

I’ve been fortunate. We’ve worked with probably twenty different major music gear companies and currently work with Taylor Guitars, Electro-Voice, and the Berkeley School of College of Music. Those are sponsors. They pay a sponsor fee and we promote their products and programs. The other thing is, because we have 80,000 musicians that came to us because they want more information about open mics, we have the ability to send an email to a particular market. We’ve been working with a number of venues across the country that see the value of putting an email in the inbox of an active musician hobbyist who is in their market. For $25 a week, we’ll send an email out to the 3,000 musicians in Boston telling them to come to your open mic, nobody else’s because nobody else is paying unless there’s 2 or 3 would then be 2 or 3. There are 3,000 people.

That’s a great deal for them, honestly.

It’s $25 a week and it takes one person walking through the door that buy dinner and a drink to cover the cost. It consistently works because when somebody gets in, it’s like, “I didn’t know about that open mic,” or, ‘I forgot.” It’s sets that reminder and it’s a good deal. Between the sponsorship and then the program we call Open Mic Pro, at $25 a week, we make enough money to float the boat.

 

I’m interested in the fact that when you started, you would go to a restaurant owner or a bar owner and say, “I’ll run this open mic for X amount per week.” As a musician, I didn’t even realize there were people that did that. I thought that it had to be like the restaurant owner had to decide to have this, but when you think about it, there’s a lot involved with setting up an open mic. It makes sense that there’d have to be like a third party that knew what they were doing to have that. What made you think to even create that offer? I’m assuming all these places all over the country that you’re promoting. There’s some middleman or middle person that’s setting these things up for the restaurants.

It was through experience. It was literally going to that one open mic and talking to the host and he was getting $50 running this thing. He would bring out this very small-time gig. I’d say, “If it was outside, if it was raining, we couldn’t do it.” He would show up with one little speaker. We’d sit there and he had a little signup sheet then, and people would walk up and sign up and I said, “Do they pay you to do this? He goes, “Yeah. They give me $50 and I get to eat.” Okay.

When I went to do it on my own, when the guy said I didn’t suck, I said, “Good. It’s $150.” He goes, “Okay.” When the other places actually called me, I think I said it was $250, and they all said okay. It’s the same formula you use when you play out as a solo acoustic artist or a band. Your job is not to make music on the business front. Your job is to sell beer. Musicians hate that. It’s like, “I’m not a beer salesman.” “Yes, you are.” You either bring people in because they know you and love you or if they have people there, you keep them because they love your music and you cement them to the chair so they buy more music.

That’s the same thing with an open mic. If I show up and two people show up to play, great. We all get lots of time to play, but the bar is not making any money. That’s when they show you the door and you got to leave. That’s why the way I do open mics, it starts with having the host and the sound system and offering advanced sign-up and all these other things. I study other people’s open mics and eliminate all the parts that suck and keep the parts that I think are great.

From that we’ve been able to create something that musicians and then we do the marketing. We send out that email and we put it on the website. We have 40 Facebook pages that correspond to open mics in all the major markets in the US. We do a lot of promotion. We make events on Facebook and we drive things so that when we say we’re going to come in and have a host and we’re going to bring in the people, all you need to do is open the doors and treat them nice. It’s easy for a venue owner to digest that this could possibly work.

It falls in the same category. It’s called an on-premise promotion. On-premise promotion is an umbrella term for anything that a venue would pay a third party for to come in to generate business on a given night. That’s live music. That’s karaoke. That’s open mic. Trivia, bar bingo, any of that is on-premise promotion. We’re all in the same game. We’re all selling beer in a venue. I’d be remiss if I didn’t back up a little bit. The main way that we continue to make money, the most money we make is actually operating the open mics.

 

That’s what I wanted to know. Are all these people that are doing the open mics people that you’ve trained and they do your system or do they apply somehow to be in your network?

The vast majority of the open mics on our websites are people doing it on their own. Typically, an open mic host would be a musician that’s a music teacher, somebody that plays out solo, somebody plays in a band, somebody who does maybe some online teaching or in-person teaching. Sunday through Thursday nights are wide open. They go to a place close by home and they say to the venue, “I want to run an open mic.”

Maybe they had been in the open mic world and somewhere else and once you’re in it, you see how all the moving parts work and you know how money changes hands, it is pretty easy. I think we have 1,800 open mic hosts, separate database. The term open mic, unfortunately, can mean three things. A lot of open mics will say, “We welcome anybody,” like at a coffee shop in a progressive area. Let’s say there’s a bunch of hippies at a coffee shop and they say, “We welcome poetry and we welcome comedy. We welcome music.”

I was wondering if you have spoken word.

No. The thing is Taylor doesn’t care about reaching spoken word poets. Evie doesn’t care about reaching comedians. They want to reach musicians. I want to reach musicians.

You think about that scene in So I Married An Ax Murderer where he is doing the spoken poetry in San Francisco or whatever. I was thinking about that. That’s not what you guys do. You’re only music.

Micro Music Festival

Just music. Live music, open mic is what we are. To that end, I changed the name of open mics. I call them micro music festivals.

That sounds much more upscale.

That’s like a microbrewery. Everybody loves microbreweries. Festival. Who doesn’t like a music festival. Everybody loves a music. You have a micro music festival. What is a micro music festival? You’re going to have multiple acts. You’re going to have food and booze. You buy a ticket and come in. Everybody knows what a festival is. If you shrink it on down and you think about what is an open mic, you have multiple acts. You have food and booze. It is a more befitting name than open mic. I have people ask me all the time, “Okay, I get it.” I explain it like that. They’re like, “Yeah, but I have one question. How are micro music festivals different than open mics?” I say, “They have a better name.”

“No, how are they different?” I say, “They have a better name. That’s it. It’s the same.” There’s nothing about a music festival that says comedy or poetry, so it’s all music. That’s how I do that. I run a bunch of micro music festival. If a venue contacts me in Chicago and wants to have one, they’re like, “I saw your website. We were thinking about setting one of these up, but we don’t know how to do it,” I say, “We can promote you for free or if you want to find a host and do all that, for $25 a week, we’ll do a lot of promotion for you or for $250 a week, we’ll do everything. We’re going to send in the host, we’re going to do all the promotion. It’s turnkey. You don’t have to worry about it. You get to use the term micro music festival because, I don’t know if I mentioned it, it is copyrighted.

Very smart.

Thank you. Micro music festival, for the use of exactly what we’ve talked about, is prohibited unless you’re working with me.

Restaurants and bars can contact you and say, “This looks cool. We have no idea how to do this. Can you provide us with someone to do it?”

What I do is I go into my database of 1,800 open mic hosts that are either current or past hosts and let’s say to maybe I’ve got ten in Chicago. I send a note to everybody, “This is the location, this is the thing, this is the opportunity, this is the pay. Is anybody interested?” Three people says, “Yeah, I’m interested. I’ve got nothing going on Tuesday.” I talk to each one and find out which one would be the best fit. Basically, I curate the host down to the one person who becomes the person who shows up feet on the street and runs the thing. We drive the marketing from high atop the hill overlooking Lake Lanier in Oakwood, Georgia.

I love this because, first of all, when I was thinking about open mics, I’m like, “This is such a great opportunity for musicians and stuff,” but it is an opportunity for another income stream for, like you said, people that are teaching during the day. Maybe they’re teaching music in junior high school or they’re a choir teacher or whatever or they’re teaching voice lessons and they’ve got evenings free. That’s smart. It’s another stream of income. Also, you’ve got a lot of connections with a lot of musicians who want a place to showcase what they’re doing outside of a recital.

 

One of the things that we do when we hook up with a venue in a particular place is if the venue lends itself to that. Another thing I’ve been doing is doing micro music festivals with municipalities. There is this trend across the country where practically every little town, especially in the suburbs around major cities, like here in Atlanta, there’s Duluth and Suwanee in Gainesville, the Alpharetta and all these places that people in the other part of the country never heard of, but they’re thriving cities under themselves.

They all have a town square and they all have this thriving restaurant bar scene. The cities have said the best way to support that scene is to bring in live music. I play cover songs and things. The city of Duluth, it’s down the road, had two people playing simultaneously for three days straight during an arts festival. The city pays the performer. In that situation, I say to them, “Instead of having one performer, why don’t you hire me and I’ll bring in a micro music festival?” That way, instead of it being, “Here’s one performer,” and everybody is consuming the music, we’ll have ten performers. Those people will reach out to people they know and actually bring more people to the festival. Butts in seats, heads in beds.

Also, it’s inclusive. We will reach out to the local community and the local musicians that live there can actually take the stage and participate in the entertainment process as opposed to just consuming it. That’s getting a lot of traction. We’re actually in the little town up here in Gainesville. They have a beautiful little square. Every Wednesday in July, from 7:00 to 9:00, I’m actually hosting it because it’s close to home. I’m doing the Gainesville Micro Music Festival and I put it out there to the 3,000 or so musicians on the Atlanta list and said, “If you’re interested, send a demo.” I curated the list and we’ve filled up everything. It’s actually five Wednesdays in July. It’s all full already and ready to go.

That brings up my next question because when you walked into that bar a long time ago with your cassette and he’s like, “How do I know that you don’t suck?” I think there’s this idea about open mics that it’s anybody that’s there and all you have to do is put your name on the list and you could suck. If you’re going to call it a micro music festival, do you audition everybody in advance?

It depends. It’s a negotiable item with the venue or whoever we’re working with. We work with Aspire Healthy Energy drinks marketed to women. It’s like Red Bull Light. It’s all natural, very healthy, good stuff. They’ll do samplings and hand out and they’ll maybe a Run For Breast Cancer. Obviously, it’s going to be full of women and they set up a little table and they do sampling at the finish line. They hand everybody a drink. They have the Aspire Micro Music Festival playing next to the booth so that there’s this energy and the name Aspire goes a long way with aspiring artists. We curate that, who wants to play? It’s going to be a lot of people. It’s a big deal. It’s no pay, but it’s a good way to go.

We curate those. Some venues are like, “I don’t want anybody on stage that sucks.” It’s a micro music festival, so it’s easily digestible by musicians to say, “Of course I have to apply.” When was the last time you went to Lollapalooza and walked up on stage and like, “I’m Dave.” It’s a micro music festival. When we run them, we do tend to curate them. As I said, everything, they’re in municipalities. They want to make sure that it’s kid-friendly and it’s quality music. We have a crazy variety and we have country guys, we have cowboy guys, we have jazz. We’re all over the board but everybody’s pretty good.

What if the musicians aren’t amateurs? What if they actually have merch that they want to put out and they want to give out their cards or collect email? Do you allow that?

Yeah. We encourage it. It touches on the point that there are multiple uses for an open mic. It’s not a one-dimensional thing where amateurs come up and play. It starts with that. You have amateurs, but you say amateurs, you have a lot of people that used to play music as a kid and then they realize they’re not going to make a living in music.

Open mic is not just one-dimensional. Share on X

They go get jobs and then they get married and they have kids and then they pop out the other end on their 40s and they’ve got time on their hands. They have the guitar sitting in the corner and play with a friend and the friend says, “There’s this bar up here and they got an open mic. We should go up there.” They walk through the door and they have the time of their life.

They go in to play music but what they do is they realize that it’s a whole social scene. One of the hardest things to do as an adult is make new friends because everybody’s so busy and stuff. You make friends when you’re kids and you stay in touch all your life. Most people have friends for life from when they were kids and very few friends that they made once they got out.

Especially if you move away like me. I have a couple friends for life, but I don’t see them.

With some of my friends in California, I’ve known since high school. I hosted an open mic locally here for sixteen years every Wednesday night. If you think an open mic can have legs, I’m living through it. Probably twenty marriages occurred. People met at my open mic musicians that were there and girls came in. The next thing, they’re talking and next thing you know, they’re having babies. I’m being invited to weddings. It is crazy. I’ve had weddings. Those people get divorced and then the guy gets married again. All sixteen years is a long time.

I would say on the female side, as far as why people would come to open mics later in life, a lot of women, myself included, you get busy having kids or whatever. You can’t go out there and perform. Maybe you used to perform before that or you found that you can work through some issues in your life by writing music or whatever but then you haven’t had a lot of experience performing. You want to get out there and sing your songs and see what people think of them. That’s a time when people can start going to open mics. Do you allow original music or is it all covers or mixes?

Absolutely. As a matter of fact, some of the venues we’re in don’t want to pay the PRO fee., the ASCAP and BMI. The only music that they ever book in there is original music because that’s how you get around it. They’re not beholden to anybody.

That brings up a good point. Do you deal with that to make sure that they’re actually paying? Are you the middle man for collecting that or do you have to make sure that they’ve applied or is that on them that they’re paying for their cover fees?

It’s totally on the venue. The musicians are not required to pay licensing fees to play cover songs. The venues in which you perform are required.

For sure. You don’t know that they’re doing that.

Don’t know, don’t care.

That’s up to them.

I know we’ve been in venues that refuse to play the pros and we do cover songs and nothing ever happened.

The musicians can report that, too. I played here, I played there and then let the PRO know that the venue is not complying.

It’s hard to hide if you’re a venue and doing live music because the whole point of what we do is to promote the fact that we’re doing open mics at a venue. If the PRO never found the Open Mic Network, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. “Let’s see that one. They’re doing an open mic on Tuesday night send in the hounds.” They did send somebody in and they’ll sit there and they’ll record it and they’re like, “We have proof that you’re doing cover songs.” If they want to do all original, then we can do that. Most open mics are original covers, in addition to let’s say you have musicians that rediscover the joy of making music. I’ve got a saying that hearing music touches the heart, but making music touches the soul.

Hearing music touches the heart. Making music touches the soul. Share on X

If you have the ability to make music, you need to go out and do that. Doing that with other people elevates it exponentially. You get this social thing. It’s a tangible thing. It’s easy to make friends because you’re all doing the same thing and you’re jazz. This guy’s a lawyer and this guy works at a gas station, but they’re bonding over music and they become real friends. The lawyer would’ve pulled in and got gas, talked to the guy for ten seconds and moved on. Now they’ve got this common point.

The social aspect and also the expression, because music obviously is art. Artists need to express themselves. An open mic stage is that for so many people, you’ve mentioned professionals. The one thing I think is used least frequently is in that arena where you’ve got people that are professional. Maybe they’re solo acoustic and they’re trying to bust it in the modern day.

That’s done through social media, booking gigs, networking and all that good stuff. You build an audience online and then go someplace where that audience is and sell tickets. That’s how you make money because nobody’s buying music. Let’s say you come to Atlanta and you’re going to play at Eddie’s attic and you’ve got a gig on Thursday, why don’t you come in a couple of days early and then map out all the open mics in advance of the show? You’re actually promoting the show on Thursday, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

People hear you and they meet you and they talk to you and now you friends. You could say, “You should come to my show.” You’d be surprised how many people will say, “Yeah, I’ll come to Eddie’s on Thursday and watch your show.” That’s how you get real fans in the real world. You use the open mic as a way to collect emails, and touchpoints, invite people to shows and let them hear your music firsthand live. You’re not getting paid, but what you’re doing is you’re paying a fee for marketing and that’s your time and your talent. You don’t have to pay the money, but you got to show up. You got to play the songs, you got to network, you got to talk to people, collect emails, and then invite them to your show.

It’s going to be a lot more successful than putting out flyers of people don’t know who the heck you are. If you’ve gone to an open mic, they’re like, “I’ve connected with you over your music and you’ve been ten feet away from me.” You’ve got that real connection

All the music’s online. You immediately go and you start, you digest, ingest all the great music from the artist. What do people do? They share it. “I met this girl and she’s got this insane voice. It’s angelic. Her songs are amazing. She’s playing Eddie’s on Thursday. I want to go. You guys can come with me.” The next thing you know, you meet 1 person and they bring 10 people and they all become fans. In the world of sales, it’s probably the absolute best way to sales, bar none. You say, “Is it telemarketing? Is it like a commercial?” No, it’s one-on-one. Shake somebody’s hand, look them in the eye and tell them why your product’s good. You can’t do that if you’re selling Coca-Cola. You can’t walk around to everybody and say, “You should try one of these.”

You’d die of old age before you get 100,000 people. In this world, we’re sensory overloaded with so much music and it’s coming out of nowhere. If you can find a way where that one touch point could mushroom out into many, I think open mics are definitely the way to go. I also think that real music festivals, the micro music festival, obviously, yeah, the open mic, the bigger music festivals, if you’re unknown or whatever, they don’t pay anything or they don’t pay well.

 

Still, that’s a real exposure gig, I think, playing festival and getting out there in front of a lot of people. You’ll have merch and you’d be promoting your website and your music and that would be a way to get some traction for your music. That’s what it’s all about. Get people to hear it and then give them an action point, a way to connect with you online and become real followers and real fans.

Good marketing’s going to cost you. It’s either going to cost you money or time, especially when you’re first starting out. It’s worth it. The one-on-one is what’s going to bring you the super fans. That makes a lot of sense. Now I know that you actually help musicians, as we were talking about cover songs, go from starting out doing these open mics and things to actually go out and become a cover musician and do that as a career, making money, doing cover gigs all over town. How do you get people from one to the other?

Performer Pro

This is something that didn’t require me to go to school other than the school of life. I’m the poster child for the journey. I mentioned I was going to this open mic and I came back and it ended. I started another open mic. Somewhere in there, it occurred to me that I could actually play out it. I think it was the bar where I was doing the open mic that said, “Can you play? Do you have a band?” I’m like, “Yeah, I know all these guys from the open mic. Sure, yeah, I have a band.” It’s like, “We need somebody Friday night. Can you play?” I’m like, “Yeah, I can play.” The next thing you know, I’ve got a paid gig in a bar in a band by accident. I stumbled forward. The opportunities found me. I like to say if I could give advice to anybody, ever anywhere that I meet, is head on a swivel.

When you drive, if you drive looking straight ahead, you’re going to get hit by the guy coming from the side. Look to the side. It’s common sense. Do that all the time, physically and mentally. Have your antenna up, head on a swivel, looking around for opportunities, whether it’s you’re a musician, you’re looking for the next gig or networking. That’s what networking is. Have the head on a swivel.

Head on a swivel, “You could play here.” I’m like, “Maybe I can do more with this.” The open mic thing. I was running an open mic, I got fired, I got three open mics, and I’m like, “I never thought of that before. Maybe open mics can be a business. Maybe it can make a living in the open mic world. Nobody else does, but maybe I can.” I’m the guy with the arrows in the back. They call me a pioneer.

I started playing out and I found a guy playing at a Mexican restaurant, and I asked him, “How do you get this gig?” He says, “I work with this agent.” He gives me the number. I called the guy and he goes, “I book 40 Mexican restaurants all over Atlanta.” “How much is it? How much do you pay?” He says, “It’s $100. You go in for three hours, you get a speedy to eat.” “Speedy? What is it?” “That’s the tacos and enchilada and rice and beans.” I said, “You got it down to what I’m going to eat. Whatever. It sounds like gold to me.”

I get to eat something I wouldn’t normally eat and $100, and then I got to give him $10 for booking.” The guy had me booked all the time and he turned out to be a real ass. I was on the taco tour and I got off the taco tour and I started figuring out how to get better gigs in this. I had the worst equipment. I had a Fender PA and it was made for use at a school, like if the teachers were talking to kids or something. It was all in one and it was cheap and I put the two little speakers out and it was awful. I figured out like, “I see. A big powered speaker. That’d be nice.” I changed my sound. I made all the mistakes, but I always stumbled forward.

Now I get the highest paying gigs in town. I am very selective. I have a gig and people hear this. They’re like, “You do that?” “Yeah, for ten years.” I put my gear on a golf cart and I ride down the backyard and put the gear on my pontoon boat, and then I ride twenty minutes over to the floating bar and then I play, and then they give me $300 and a tab, and then I make $100 in tips. I get a drink and a cigar and I slowly ride home. Best commute ever via boat. Anybody that’s some musicians, professional musicians had the load outs from hell where you have to go downstairs or go upstairs and they pay $100 a man since the ‘70s.

I’ve cracked the code on how to get good gigs and how to put on a professional performance cover song. I even play probably years in the Caribbean for years. My wife and I go for free to all-inclusive resorts, and I play for one hour and I get Saturdays off. I have a six-hour work week, and we both get a five-star vacation. People are like, “You do that?” I’m like, “Yes.” I go to gigs on my boat. If you want to do what I do, you might want to consider taking a course called Performer Pro. Everything in the course is not going to be an epiphany, like brand new, but when you put it together, it’s a very logical thing. Everybody’s got a different jump off point and a different starting point.

A lot of the things we go over, the basic thing, I’m assuming that you can sing and you can play, you’ve got a repertoire, something to start with. I’m not going to teach you how to play guitar or teach you how to sing, but I do answer the question. The biggest question a lot of amateurs have is like, “I play at the open mic, but am I good enough to get a paid gig?” Even without hearing you play a note, I say yes. The reason I can do that is that you live someplace. I assume you live in a populated area, not in Northern Montana, and you have a town and there are restaurants and bars and you have a sphere of friends. Maybe you’re on a tennis team, you go to church, whatever. You have people that personally like you and support you.

You could go to those people and say, “I’ve got a paid gig at McNally’s on Saturday night. I’m going to be up there playing music for three hours. Will you come support me?” If you can do that, you can get the gig at McNally’s. What you do is you ask all those people in advance, “If I get a gig at one of these local places, will you come support me?” You make a note and you’re like, “I think I’ve got twenty people that’ll actually come out and have dinner and drinks,” and cover your cost plus some profit. It’ll put butts in seats. That’s the marketable thing. You’re not marketing whether or not you’re good. You are marketing whether or not you can bring in enough people to justify the cost. You’re selling beer and that’s how I know you’re good enough.

Now, are you good enough to get the gig at the floating bar? Frankly, I don’t bring anybody out to the skit. I bring family and friends. They come out and they’re like, “Craver’s playing.” I actually cultivated a number of people on the lake who like to hear me. The reality is people come there because they know they have high quality musicians. “Who’s playing?” “I don’t know. Let’s just go to Pete’s.” You need to up your game. You need to level up if you’re going to do that. You can start and once you get paid, you’re a professional. That’s it. All you got to do is get paid is to play one time and you’re a professional musician. This course is called Performer Pro and PerformerPro.net is the website.

The nice thing is I have a pithy little book that will give you the jump-off point and to go from amateur to professional, it’s called Make Music, Make Money, and you can sign up on that website to get that free download. It’s PDF and it’ll be emailed to you. That’s it. There’s no cost, no nothing. You can read it. I think people have told me they read it in under an hour and I’ve had people say it changed their life and launch their career and, and they’re making a lot of money playing cover gigs.

Other people read that and go, “Yeah, I want a deep dive on this guy. I like what he does. I want to be him. I want the roadmap. I want him talking to me.” The course comes with one-on-one coaching, questions and answers during the course and personal gear recommendations. If you take the course, it comes down to what level, what stage you’re at quality-wise. For those that rise up of good quality, I actually put them into the Caribbean gig. I put them right with the booking agent for the Caribbean gigs.

If nothing else, that one thing. People are like, How do I get a gig?” In December, I’m going to Punta Kana. I’ve Decembered in Turks and Caicos eight years in a row, spent the whole month, five weeks, at one of the most expensive exclusive islands in the Caribbean.

PerformerPro.net is how they find that, right?

Yes.

I want to make sure that you mention about the nonprofit organization that you work with because it’s very cool.

Amped Kids

Thanks, Brie. I appreciate it. Yeah, this is near and dear to my heart. April called me one day and she used to be a host for me. She says, “Dave, I’m starting this organization. I know you’re a good business guy and I was hoping maybe you could give me some advice.” It took about ten minutes and I said, “I’m in.” She goes, “Do you want to be on the board?” “Yeah, I’m in.” It is called AmpedKids.org. What we do is we do fundraising to support paying for music lessons and instruments for kids in the foster care system. The reason this is so important is music is transformational. It changes lives and changes the life of a child that’s unfortunate enough to find themselves in the foster care system, which means their parents are either deceased or unfit to be parents, and they’ve been taken from their parents. They’re placed into a system and they’re being raised by strangers.

Many of the strangers are wonderful and, and they become their official foster parents. Some kids never get a permanent home. They live in a foster care home. They live temporarily. Music for those kids gives them something to use as to express themselves. We actually have songwriting workshops, and I do a number of those teaching basics on songwriting. Watch these kids come alive in that workshop. They write a song, their first song, and the next thing you know, they’re like, “What do I have to do to take a guitar lesson?” “You don’t have to do anything. You just did it. You told me and we’ll take care of it.”

All the lessons are free. We pay all the instructor’s full rate. We don’t ask instructors to donate their time. In some instances, they want to and they do extra things for us, and then we have to purchase guitars and keyboards. If a student wants to be in the school band, a lot of times, there’s cost to every kid that the parents are supposed to pony up a couple hundred dollars or whatever it is to be in the band to cover instrument costs and things like that. We’ll do that.

We’re very flexible on what we do with the funds, but it’s all directly at the kids and directly at music education for the kids and some of the most needy kids in our society. A lot of the kids are trouble. They’re into drugs, they’re criminals, they’re doing and they end up in the system and they find music and it changes their lives and puts them on a path. Instead of dropping out of school and becoming a problem to society, kids that come into our system bring music into their life, graduate school, go on to college and become productive members of the system.

Instead of dropping out of school and becoming a problem to society, kids who come into our system bring music into their lives, graduate from school, go on to college, and become productive members of the system. Share on X

If we can do that once, great. If we can do it 1,000 times, it moves the needle in this arena in a space that’s desperate for people to care. If anybody wants to help out and donate, it’s AmpedKids.org. You go on there and there’s a donate button and anything, $5,000, whatever it is. We also accept donated instruments. Also, we work with Guitars For Kids out of Oregon. It’s another fantastic organization. They go to the guitar manufacturers. We did a thing with them in Nashville at the Gibson guitar plant. Gibson gave away 200 brand-new guitars, and I think we got eleven of those for our kids here in Georgia. We’re operating in Georgia and Tennessee, and we teamed up with a company through our connection at Guitars For Kids that actually has taken over and running the foster care system for states.

I think they’re in Oregon. I think they’re taking over Tennessee and I think, Arkansas. They love what we’re doing automatically. Part of our trouble is getting into the states and convincing them that what we do is worth their time because maybe they don’t understand the value of music and so we have to bring them to speed. Working with this company, the second that they turn on the lights, they call us and say, “Get over here and start this.” We’re going to work with them to march across the country. Also, 100% of the money that comes in goes right back into the lessons and the kids. I’m a volunteer, our founder, April, still is a volunteer. She’s a real estate agent to make money and she volunteers. We have a number of people on the board that all volunteer.

You guys go check out AmpedKids.org. That is so cool, especially if you’re in the Nashville area or Atlanta area. Such a great organization. David, I want to thank you so much. You’ve shared so much great stuff. I appreciate you sharing those backstage secrets and stuff. I want to encourage everybody to go check out all the resources. Thank you, David, so much for everything that you shared with us and for giving us your time.

Brie, thank you. I appreciate you having the podcast of all podcasts.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Open Mic Network
• OpenMicNewYork.com
• OpenMicSanDiego.com
• PerformerPro.net
• Make Music, Make Money
• AmpedKids.org

 

About David Craver

David Craver is a performing musician and a singer/songwriter. He started the Open Mic Network in 2000. He has an online course that teaches amateurs how to become performing professionals, called, Performer Pro.