How To Make Your Act Go Viral

What's up gigging pros! It's Jared Judge Welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. I am super pumped. I met to record this podcast yesterday. But it was pouring rain in Denver. And it didn't quite feel safe recording an episode in that kind of a flooding rainstorm. So I hope you'll forgive me. But I'm still just as excited about what happened as I was yesterday, which is that I went and visited with a DJ, and secured a partnership, which, as you know, that's been my thing. I am the partner guy in the music industry here. How can you partner with other businesses and people to launch your music career. So I've mainly hammered home partnering with private event venue, and private event planners. And I just want to open up your eyes that you can partner with other people to other business types, and other other types of people, too. And DJs are one of them. And let me just tell you a quick story about how this worked. So a while ago, I had met this gentleman, his name is Rob, he runs Elite Entertainment in Denver. They're a DJ company. They also rent out like AV equipment. And when we went to their space, I saw they also had like chandeliers. And it was like tons of things that they can rent out for private events. And so I met him at a networking event. It was NACE, actually, it was this past one about a month ago. And we chatted, hit it off. I introduced myself as an electric violinist. And he got Oh, that's pretty cool. I'd love to meet meet, you get to know you. And so we, we did play the Zoom meeting. So we chatted on Zoom. And it was really cool. He likes the concept of electric violin. And in fact, he had mentioned to me that a lot of his competitors competing DJs were starting to do dj plus, like an instrument. So DJ would play their tracks, and then maybe a guitarist or saxophonist would play on top of it. And then people seem to really like it. He actually called that fusion, which I'd never really heard of that as an act before. But he said some of his competitors were doing fusion. And he wanted to explore this more. So on the Zoom chat, he asked me, you know, how did I get into this? I told him that I'm actually relatively new to electric violin. Been playing violin for years. But the electric part is pretty new. And so yeah, he liked my videos. He said, Yeah, if clients asked about it, would you be interested in partnering? I said, Sure. And he's like, I'm still figuring this out. Could we get together and like, jam out with this? Where he DJs and then I play violin. And I said, Sure, let's book a time. And then of course, the month slipped away from me got very busy. I traveled to Wisconsin. So we kept having to reschedule for a little bit. But luckily, he was patient with me, as I rescheduled on him a couple of times. And yesterday was the day I went to his office. So I went to his office and brought my violin brought my mixer, brought my laptop with my tunes on it just in case, which I didn't need because he's a DJ, it's cut to the so yeah, we introduced me, I made some small talk. My pet has dogs, he had his dogs in his office. And then we got down to business. I plugged my violin into his mixer, adjusted some reverb, myself sound real pretty. And then he just started playing some, some technical music. I think it was like house. And it just started jamming along. And, you know, I'm not like the best improviser. But I did it anyway. And I was enjoying myself playing off of what he was given me. And then he asked for a couple tunes that I like to do. So, you know, shout it out. Some Bruno Mars locked out of heaven. Some ved clarity. And, yeah, he played those tunes. And I played on top of them. He was having a good time that he was throwing me some curveballs. Like he was doing remixes of what was it like, we might have done brown eyed girl, because he's a wedding DJ in addition to like, he does a lot of higher profile events too. So brown eyed girl trying to think what that other tune was that he had me play. Give me one second here. Sorry, my brain is still it's like pretty early here. So my brain is still waking up. It'll come back to me. But yeah, I played on top of it. And we both had a good time. And he had an office assistant, who was holding a phone and taking videos of us. And it was great. At the end, we kind of just chatted, he asked me a bunch of questions about how this works and how he could scale it to other DJs in his company. Because, you know, I'm not sure if you guys know, but a lot of DJ companies have multiple DJs on their roster. That's called a multi app shop, because it's multi operator. So he was like, trying to ask me, Well, what's the best way to do this? We came up with a good plan. And then we just kind of recapped what would it look like when somebody hires him to do this fusion act. And I said, either just let me know how let you know if either myself or one of my other electric violinist on my roster are available. Then I talked to him a little bit about how I run my electric violin company a little bit like a multi up DJ service. And he was like, sounds awesome. Let's make it happen. So we agreed to it. And then that's great. Because like, that is a secured partnership, that will bear fruit for years to come. And it just takes one to like, get a huge return on your investment. Because you know how much I paid for that. Zero? Like, obviously, there's some strategy behind it. But I didn't spend any money aside from with gas and my time driving to his DJ office. And then the even cooler part was that he his office assistant, posted two of those videos to the DJ companies, Facebook, or Instagram stories, and tagged me in it and put a little poll like would this make a good dance party, and people started responding Yes. And then I re shared that on my Instagram Stories, saved it as a post, and then posted it on my main real page, so that it lives there as like, an asset that will collect the views and likes for the future. So again, all these different like marketing systems are integrated. So partnerships are integrated with organic social media, which then can be get other partnerships, which is one of the things I'm extra excited about, is that immediately, like this morning at six in the morning, which was only like two hours ago, I got an Instagram message from a another event planning company that said, hey, we need to talk about working together. I said, Sure. What did you have in mind? And they said, are you free to chat today, we do private, immersive interactive experiences, we'd love to include you on any of them. And then they included their phone number. So one partnership, plus social media equals another partnership, which again, I spent $0 on this, this person who wants to partner was pre sold on working with me because of two things. One was they saw the video of me playing, and they liked it. Which that's why you got to have videos, like he got to have good videos, they don't have to be amazing, but they have to like, feel like a performance. Like they shouldn't really just be like you recording a rehearsal in your kitchen, which is okay, if that's all you've got, but like, let's try to upgrade that. And then the second part was, they were pre sold on their partnership by my partnership with this other company. So in a way, I'm like, basically, turning my axe viral in the event planning community, just by partnering with certain people, and then being public about my partnership with these people. So I guess that's kind of the new strategy, which is how to take the partnership strategy and then light it on fire. So I'm super excited about it. And I share all the stories like these are all 100% True Stories, you can you know, I've got the receipts on my Instagram. So you could check that out at Extreme Strings Violins. And I hope that they inspire you. Because even if you can't necessarily play along with a DJ, you can partner with many, many people in the private events industry. All you have to do is find the people that you want to partner with. Find the angle with which to partner, which for me with DJs it's like I can jam along with you. I can play with you or your other DJs that is the angle and it creates an immersive client experience for the people who hire your DJ company. But then the angle for venues is a little bit different. That is like I could come take a tour of your venue. And ultimately the goal is for me to make your venue really sing and sound just as good as it looks. So you give your clients a great experience. That's the angle there. The angle for partnering with event planners is I will do a fantastic job with their clients and to give them an unforgettable experience. Like yes, there's a lot of overlap between those angles. But you do have to recognize the different angles and tailor your message and your strategy to each of those. So I hope that's helpful. Yeah, if you're interested, I have a list of people that you should reach out to, even if you're in Anchorage, Alaska. And that list is called the Gig Vault. That is the list of people to partner with in the private events industry in your area. It's absolutely free. comes with a free trial of Fulltime Music Academy, which has all of the strategy behind this as well as email templates to send. To get your free copy, go to FulltimeMusicAcademy.com/venues And I will see you on the inside. So thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember,"Your music won't market itself!".