What to expect from Last Minute Musicians

Nothing makes us happier than to read such fantastic comments like the ones below…

Knowing we have been responsible for kick-starting many careers over the years is a great achievement, but unfortunately not everyone gives us such great feedback.

We want to help all members to get as much as possible from Last Minute Musicians, especially if things aren’t currently working as well as you had hoped.

Your Expectations

Last Minute Musicians has grown from humble beginnings to be one of the UK’s most popular entertainment directories.

Having said that, joining the site doesn’t guarantee you will get gigs. It’s 100% up to the public who they decide to contact and when – we can’t control who gets the enquiries generated through Last Minute Musicians.

There were over 60,000 direct enquiries to our members in the last 12 months and the majority of members voluntarily renew. We don’t ever do automatic renewals – every listing in our directory is manually renewed by each member.

We often point out that just one booking per year should more than cover the listing cost – the enhanced listings cost less than £1.75 a week – much cheaper than advertising using other more traditional methods, or ‘pay-per-click’ advertising (like Google Ads) where you might expect to pay up to £1.75 just for a single click!

A listing on Last Minute Musicians is similar to a web site, except you can set up everything within a few minutes!

You don’t have to build up your own traffic, do any coding, set up a domain, hosting, SEO or any of the other time consuming and costly expenses associated with creating and maintaining your own site.

As the site brings in so many enquiries for some members and not for others, it’s hard for us to manage everyone’s expectations.

We have hundreds of hugely positive reviews from members, some telling us how we have helped transform careers, but we also have some members that are unhappy with their results.

If you are struggling to get any results from your listing, please check out ways to improve and promote your listing – just small tweaks to the settings can make a huge difference to your enquiry numbers. We have an extensive help & support page with answers to most questions, or you can contact us for further help.

Trends To Note

1. Live Gig Seasons

Although it’s hard to be very accurate with these things – this is a rough graph showing the peak periods for when live gigs tend to happen throughout the year:

It’s very common for there to be a peak in the summer months and a bit of a dip around October – November.

This might be a good time to plan a holiday rather than in the middle of the summer during peak wedding season. As advertising by its nature is sporadic, try to look at the bigger picture rather than panicking if you don’t have any enquiries during quiet periods.

2. Types of events

Our musicians have been booked for all sorts of events, from a run of the mill birthday party through to high profile events like The Olympics, The Royal Wedding, TV show, London Fashion Week etc.

By far the most popular type of event enquiries are for weddings and parties. Although there is a clear spike in the summer months, we find that people plan their weddings all year round so wedding enquiries tend to be quite consistent.

We have noticed a spike after Christmas / New Year which could be related to couples getting engaged over the festive period.

3. Enquiries vs Bookings

We understand that enquiries don’t automatically turn in to bookings and our members have given us mixed feedback on this topic. Some report 100% conversion rates while others have struggled to convert more than half of their enquiries.

Conversion rates probably depend a lot on how clear your listing is to start with. If customers can get a lot of info about what you offer and your pricing from your listing then it is more likely when they send you an enquiry that they will book. On the flip side, listings that give less information will encourage more enquiries asking to clarify what’s on offer and the pricing.

4. Enquiry numbers

Making money from enquiries isn’t just about the number of enquiries. Some members have told us about one enquiry that has led to residency bookings that bring in thousands of pounds every year.

Advertising can be sporadic so it’s best to look at the results over a long period of time to really judge whether it is good value for money. Making contact with just one event planner, venue or wedding organiser in your area might set you up with regular gigs for years to come.

5. Geographical location

Your location can play a huge part in how popular your act is. It is certainly true to say there is a lot more demand in big cities such as London, but having said that there is also a lot more choice too!

We have had reports from members based in rural areas telling us how they have dominated their local areas as there isn’t much competition.

Certain rural areas like Devon and Cornwall have a huge number of weddings as they are popular locations, but there doesn’t seem to be much competition as the locations are quite remote and hard for a lot of acts to get to.

You can set where your act is based in your listing settings and can edit your location, how far you are willing to travel and if you offer any miles free to test the results.

If you are only available up to 30 miles from your location you are likely to get a lot less enquiries than acts who have chosen to travel a lot further, so expanding your search area is always a good idea to get more enquiries.

6. Listing quality

There continues to be quite a difference in the quality of various members’ listings. Obviously the quality of your musical demos play a big part in how the public perceive you, but the overall quality of writing and clear explanations of what you offer and your pricing structure can make a big difference.

We see some listings that have had time spent on them doing very well, while others that haven’t had as much love can appear unprofessional or incomplete and therefore get less enquiries.

It might be a good idea to get a professional copy writer to check over your text as this really helps sell you. You might also want to offer discounts on various options or perhaps at certain times of year when you aren’t as busy.

7. Search Trends

Members often get frustrated by not understanding our search system. The system has been designed to be as fair as possible over time and uses a randomly set post code that changes every 30 minutes to make sure all acts get equal exposure over time.

This does however mean that at any one time your position in the results could vary a lot. Please don’t panic if you find a search like this – check back in 30 minutes and you will have moved.

In reality we see most of our visitors searching for very specific pages, like “guitarists in Oxford” for example. If you type that in to Google you will see a very specific page from our search results showing guitarists available in Oxford.

This means that using Google, customers can quickly refine their search to be very specific before they even enter Last Minute Musicians. The more “generic” pages that you might navigate to have search filters to allow users to quickly narrow their results based on their requirements.

8. Pricing

Pricing is one of the most hotly debated subjects of all. With platforms like Uber driving down the end cost to consumers, sometimes it seems that the public is always looking to pay as little as possible, especially whilst researching prices online.

Recently we published an article titled “What Should I Charge? Real World Advice for the Performing Musician” which used data from our site to discuss pricing trends. Also check out a related article “Musicians wages – the great debate…” which discusses pricing factors.

Innovation

Free SMS alerts are just one of the many new features we’ve introduced recently. Other new features include a timeline inside your account which informs you about all the activity related to your listing (such as edits, milestones, enquiries etc.) and our new favourites system that allows customers to contact multiple acts much more efficiently.

Another fairly new addition is our Last Minute Musicians Members Facebook Group which at the time of writing already has over 1650 members.

The group allows members to bounce ideas off the rest of the community as well as get direct help from admins with any issues. We also post extra gig opportunities for our members and ask for suggestions when we are struggling to find particular acts.

We work hard every day to add new content to the site and make improvements wherever we can. If you have any feedback we’d love to hear from you – please post a comment at the bottom of this post.

While most advertisers don’t like competition, we strongly believe that for our site to continue to grow and become more useful for event planners, it is very important for us to offer as much choice as possible.

Our directory is only useful to people if they can find what they are looking for!

As our traffic has grown we have more enquiries per member than ever. To read our ever growing list of testimonials, please visit our register page or see our reviews on Facebook. If you know any musicians or bands that aren’t already featured, please consider using our sign up a friend offer and bag yourself some free months (and some for them!).

If you enjoyed this post and would like to comment, please do it below (rather than on Facebook where it will get lost over time) so other members can read what you have to say...

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