The Tour CD (or cassette)
It’s time to bring back another time-honored musical tradition: the tour CD (or cassette). This is a great way to give something exclusive to your fans who come out and see you on tour.
What is a tour CD?
A tour CD/cassette is an informal, very limited special edition set of recordings. It doesn’t have to be anything expensive, highly produced, or have a lot of tracks. 2-4 self-made demo-style bedroom recordings, with limited to no production value will do.
Maybe include your versions of some covers, self-recorded in your bedroom. For a micro-tour, you could dupe the cassettes yourself, or burn the CDs straight off your computer using a CD burner you can buy from a thrift shop.
A tour CD or cassette is also a great way to get use out of a few of those random recordings sitting on your hard drive right now; the ones that didn’t make the cut for the studio album.
Make it limited, make it special
The thing to remember is that these are tracks that shouldn’t be available anywhere else, probably forever. This is a special, free, very limited thing that’s only for the true fans that took the time out of their day to show up.
It’s a little special thank-you for coming out to the show, so it should be something that you can only get at the show, if you showed up in-person. I wouldn’t ever release these recordings to the general public.
If you do this right, your fans might even take care of that for you. As an example, here’s a bootleg recording of an old Phoebe Bridgers tour CD from way back in 2016, uploaded by a fan:
Read the comments on the video to see how meaningful these rough, informal recordings have been for people: I can’t think of a better form of free marketing. 130k views from a channel with just 158 subs (at time of writing).
More important than subs and views is that this is a great little gift, which not only helped Phoebe Bridgers build her career, but also remains as a document to how things went down before she got big.
Making your shows memorable
A random person at a venue might not remember the name of your band the very first time they see you. But, they will remember how you made them feel.
In a sea of bland, beige/black/busted band T-shirts clogging up the merch table, giving away a free tour demo CD or cassette is a great way to stand out, and turn a casual observer into a fan for life.
Tour CDs are a win-win on every level: fans love them, it’s a special thank-you for coming out to the show, they don’t take a lot of time, effort or money to execute, and they let you make use of informal recordings you’ve probably already got lying around.
