Every booking guide on the internet gives you the same advice: "Make a spreadsheet of venues with their contact info, genre preferences, capacity, and booking guidelines." It's solid advice. It's also a trap that eats 20+ hours of your life before you send a single email.
Here's what actually happens. You open Google Sheets. You make columns for venue name, city, capacity, booker name, booker email, genre, website, notes. You start researching. The first venue takes 10 minutes because you have to dig through their website, find the booking page, figure out who handles booking, and verify the email is current. The second venue takes 8 minutes. By venue number 15, you've been at this for two hours and you haven't written a single pitch.
Most artists abandon the spreadsheet before they hit 30 venues. The ones who push through to 50 or 100 feel like they accomplished something. and they did. But then they have to actually write and send personalized emails to every single entry. And follow up on each one. And track the responses. The spreadsheet was supposed to make booking easier. Instead it became the booking.
Why the Spreadsheet Model Is Broken
The spreadsheet approach assumes you have unlimited time and energy. You don't. You're a musician. You're writing songs, rehearsing, posting content, working a day job, maintaining relationships, and trying to stay sane. Carving out 20 hours to build a venue database is realistic for exactly nobody.
It also assumes the information you find is accurate. It often isn't. Venue bookers change. Email addresses go stale. A venue that was booking indie rock six months ago might have switched to DJ nights. One industry pro said it plainly: "Online venue registries are especially guilty of listing incorrect email addresses." So even your meticulously researched spreadsheet might be full of dead ends.
And the spreadsheet doesn't scale. If you want to book shows in a new city, you start the whole process over. New research, new entries, new emails. Every market expansion costs you another 10-20 hours of desk work.
What You Actually Need
You don't need a spreadsheet. You need three things: a list of venues that book your genre in your area, the correct booker contact for each one, and a system that sends personalized emails and follows up automatically.
The spreadsheet tries to be all three and fails at the last one entirely. It's a static document that sits in your Google Drive and does nothing until you manually act on every row.
The Alternative
Shows For Artists has a database of over 10,600 venues across all 50 US states, DC, and 10 Canadian provinces. Each venue has the booker's name, direct email, genre preferences, and capacity. already researched and cleaned. When you sign up and enter your genre and city, the system matches you with venues that actually book artists like you.
Then it writes personalized emails. Then it sends them from your Gmail. Then it follows up after 5 days. Then it does it again tomorrow.
No spreadsheet. No research. No copy-pasting. You set your pace. 1, 2, or 3 venues per day. and the system runs on autopilot while you go make music.
The 20 hours you would have spent building a spreadsheet? Spend them writing a new song. Rehearsing your set. Filming a TikTok. Anything that actually moves your career forward instead of staring at a Google Sheet pretending it's progress.
from $49/month. Get a venue reply in 30 days or your money back.