We’ll Do It Live: A DIY Guide to Podcast Live Shows
One of them was from Amsterdam. One from Arizona. A few from California. A lot from Brooklyn, but a handful from Jersey too. This isn’t a ship manifesto — it’s the audience for the Join the Party live show in June of 2018.
We put on a show in a converted office space — two acts, over 100 people, many, many jokes. We’d always wanted to do a live show, but there was no way our podcast could sell out a big theater. So, without any experience or funding, we decided to get it done ourselves.
A few months later, Amanda (one of our players and the founder of Multitude) spoke on a panel about live shows at Podcast Movement. The rest of the panel talked about performing in 10 cities over 12 days and the upsides of having a tour bus that carted talent from show to show. This was nothing like what we did, except that podcasts were involved somewhere in there.
You don’t need a million downloads or a network to put on a live show. With some know-how, extra cables, and a lot of help, you can do it too.
Why Do This in the First Place?
Live shows are awesome, but there’s a lot to think about when putting one on yourself. So why bother?
- The experience! Bookers for live shows want to see that you’ve done them before. Once you have experience performing live, it becomes a lot easier to get booked on larger tours and festivals.
- The practice! Live shows are fun and people make livings off of them. If you’ve gotten a taste for how great they are but no new opportunities are coming up, keep doing them on your own!
- The money? Probably not, unless you do a lot of them, but a show of any size can still make a bunch on merch and drinks.
- The excitement! Live shows are awesome!!! You are doing it just to do it.
We had a ton of fun and learned a lot producing our first live show in 2017. Here’s the guide we wish we had to putting on a DIY live show!
Finding a Venue
So, why do a DIY show and not get booked at an established theater?
Big venues charge a rental fee, staff fees, equipment fees, and probably take a cut of your ticket sales. There might be a food/drink minimum for your guests, too. Even if you’re ready to pay, they could still reject your request if they don’t think you have the download count to sell out the venue. Medium-to-small venues may only take a cut of your ticket fees, but require you to bring your own equipment — or else rent equipment from them a la carte. Unless your city has venues that are affordable, small enough for you to fill with people, and willing to work with you, going DIY may be the only option.
Adapting an untraditional venue into a DIY live show space means you can spend the least money AND control the most variables by doing it yourself. You can also do a DIY show at any audience size — we only had around 5,000 downloads per episode of our show when we had our first live event. So get creative! Does someone on your teamwork in an office with a big open area? How about a rehearsal space or somewhere other gatherings of people occur — school gym, church basement, community center? If you can get permission to use the space, you can turn it into a performance venue and make extra money from selling concessions or merch.
If this is already feeling like a lot to handle but you still want to get your show in front of an audience, think about applying to perform at conventions. You don’t need to pay anything extra, there’s a captive audience that probably likes what you do (ex: Spirits doing a live show about genderqueer gods at the queer comic convention Flamecon), and you can probably swing free passes to the con. Best of all, they’ll already have microphones!
Content Planning
Once you have a venue locked down, it’s time to plan what you’re going to do on stage. You’re not just the venue booker but the actors… and the director and writer and the stage manager and I have no idea what I’m doing!!
Don’t worry — you’ve been practicing for this every single time you sat down to record. Don’t stray too far from your episode structure. People are excited to see you live, to see the podcast in person; no one expects a totally new theatrical production. Start by planning out a similar show to what you would usually record.
But this live show should be your regular show PLUS. You can lean into the live elements; you have a crowd and a stage, so work with it. Get up from the table. Do audience polls by a clap of hands. Do all the rock star things you always wanted to. The crowd gives you and the episode an extra jolt of excitement, and you will feel that while performing. If you want some brownie points, tie in the geographical location if you can; Sawbones does this really well. Or, at the very least, scream: “HOW YOU DOING, CLEVELAND?!”
For the Join the Party live show, we ran a singular game of D&D that was not canon to the full story. Our usual characters played a new adventure outside of the story we tell on the podcast, so anyone could pick it up and enjoy it — even if they’d never listened before. But we added some fun live flourishes: we invited our friend Mike Schubert of Potterless on to play a side character, a hippie who lived on top of a monstrous turtle. And Eric, our Dungeon Master who ran the story that night, enlisted his friend Jeff to confirm our good and bad rolls. Jeff sat in a robe, reading a paper, on the side of the stage the entire time and became a running joke we could refer to throughout the game.
But be kind to the audience who couldn’t be there. If you plan to record the live show to post to your podcast feed, think in advance about how the audio will sound. It might be funny to do the whole live show in a mask, but no one listening later will understand the joke. And don’t rely on visual jokes. The slideshow you have planned will be hilarious… to everyone who can see the slideshow. Less so for the audience listening at home later on.
Performing
Remember how I said this isn’t theater? That’s because it’s improv. If there’s anything you’ve gleaned from being in an improv class (or around someone who was in an improv class), it’s “Yes And.” “Yes And” means, “Yes, I agree with what you said. And I will add to it.” It also means be kind to each other. If someone makes a bad joke, laugh at it anyway. Or, even better, build on it to ACTUALLY be good. Don’t say, “Wow, bad joke at our live show.” Don’t say, “Really?” Don’t say, “No, we’re talking about…” These are your beloved friends and co-podcasters. Be kind.
If you’ve listened to even one podcast live show, you probably heard the performers complain about how much time is left. Time passes quickly when you’re sweating bullets and making jokes onstage, but you should really stick to your time. No one wants to run out and get booted from the venue before the finale, or rush the end of the show after building an hour of momentum. Get a timer: a person at the back of the room holding up signs, or better yet, a countdown clock or an app on a tablet/laptop that can sit on stage facing the performers. It will fill you with existential dread to watch time tick away, but you will need that pressure to stay on time. Running five minutes over isn’t the end of the world, but you don’t ever want to be surprised at how much time is (or isn’t) left.
And before you go, thank the audience for coming. They’re really the best, huh? Tell them so. And, you know, you’ll get more applause for being nice.
Ticketing & Promotion
So, you’re ready to do the show. But is anyone coming? No?! Well, let’s get in our time machines and go back a month.
Use social media to your advantage. At least two weeks in advance (ideally 1–3 months), make a Facebook event. It may feel very 2010, but it’s a simple way to remind people that it’s happening. Then, invite everyone. Seriously. Just do it. Who cares if it’s your cousin or your ex-boyfriend or high school friends you haven’t talked to in years. They might come! Link to your ticket sales website in the Facebook event: Eventbrite and Brownpaper are two free-to-use platforms that support mobile and print-at-home tickets. Be sure to limit your number of tickets to the number of seats you can safely fit in your venue.
Once your ticket sales and Facebook event are set up, take advantage of the social media presences and platforms you already have for the show. Pick a day when you unveil the ticketing link and blast the event out. Twitter, Facebook groups, Tumblr, Instagram, Discord, Patreon. Share it! It’s your day and people should be excited.
Listeners may travel to your show from out of town, so promote it early and often. You can even share in-progress pics of your show planning and setup to entice those on the fence or remind listeners that it’s happening. There is an upper limit to your promotion where it goes from exciting to super annoying, but once or twice a week is a good frequency.
No matter how much you put it on social, don’t forget to promote your live show on your podcast. That will reach the most number of people the quickest. And your listeners obviously want to see you live, so make sure they know about it.
It’s also a great idea to bring other creator friends into the mix, like we did with Potterless. Have another podcast be the opening act, or invite a guest who would work great within the structure of your show. They’ll help add energy to your show, and can help promote the event to bring the force of two audiences together.
Tech, AV & Stage Setup
You have a lot to do to get your stage right for the show and probably only a day or so to do it. At least a week before, come up with a rigid plan that you know you’ll mess up. Schedule the entire day within an inch of its life: call times for everyone, projected time frames, sound checks, house opening, even dinner break for everyone. Prepare for the best of times, but stay flexible when changes inevitably happen day-of.
One person can’t do all of this alone. And neither can two or three or four podcasters. Enlist as many friends as possible to show up early. They can run and grab forgotten items, pick up pizza, and just be a support. No one performing that day should need to think about a pump-up Spotify playlist. Not only that, you’ll need them for the performance itself. If you’re bootstrapping, you don’t have the staff of a theater. So you need ticket people, coat checkers, concessions, merch salespeople, stage attendants, people to point towards the bathroom, and someone outside the venue to welcome guests. They’ll be more than happy to help, especially if you give them a free ticket to the actual show.
Speaking of support, help out your future self and bring backups. Backups on backups. Bring twice the amount of mics, cables, and recording options than you need. Know what your backup plan to your backup plan is. If everything breaks, where is the nearest store that carries XLR? Did you enlist a friend with equipment to bring theirs too? If your wireless mics crap out, do you have wired options as well?
You’re probably planning how to set up your equipment, but have you thought about how your stage looks? If it’s just a bunch of chairs and a table, you can do better than that! Adding visual interest to the stage builds your aesthetic and reminds the audience they’re here and excited for a show that is exclusively yours. Decorate the stage with objects relevant to your show. For Join the Party, that meant action figures, D&D books, dice, and nerdy trinkets. We built the world’s brightest game room, and the audience felt at home in it. We also added lighting with Christmas lights to make sure we were illuminated against a dark house. Everyone in the audience has to be able to see your faces from everywhere in the audience. Even hanging a big banner with your show name from the back wall or a table frames what the audience is looking at and focuses the attention back on you.
Looking at your project schedule, all of this prep work might seem pretty tight. Give yourself a lot of extra time. Things will go wrong, and you need time to get it right. If you can sound check the day before, do it. If you can drop off merch or food or drinks the day before, do it. If you can set up any of this stuff the day before, do it.
Bodies and Stuff
Remember that your listeners are real people sharing a room with you. How will you make the people who paid to see you feel comfortable, excited, and appreciated? How will you take care of their flesh prisons… er… bodies?
- Provide name tags and markers with space to list pronouns. Listeners have probably gotten to know one another within your community, and they’ll be excited to see one another! Help them identify their internet friends IRL.
- Your venue should be accessible. Period. Reserve accessible seats for anyone who needs them, both online and in the venue for any last-minute attendees. If you’re renting chairs, make sure to set up aisles wide enough for assistive devices like wheelchairs. Think about contacting a local ASL interpreter organization to see your options for hiring someone to interpret for Deaf or Hard of Hearing audience members.
- Bathrooms should be accessible, near the performance space, and all-gender. Post signs/arrows around the space if the bathrooms are around a corner or in another room.
- Water should be freely available, trash cans and recycling bins should be plentiful, and you should sell snacks and/or drinks if possible.
- If you have control over the temperature, cool down your space A LOT before the audience arrives. Lots of bodies means lots of heat, especially if stage lights are involved. Test how your sound carries with the AC or ventilation running, and make sure the volume is appropriate with both at full blast.
- Tell people what to expect well in advance: if there will be an opening act, how long the show will last, if there will be an intermission, and start/end times (that you should stick to because of your existential dread clock). If you can set aside some time afterward for a meet and greet, communicate that too; you don’t want anyone to grab you in the bathroom line before the show, thinking this is their only chance to say hello.
Woo, it’s done!
You did it!!!! We hope someone took nice photos of you. Take a little break — don’t plan for much the next day. Just relax. This will be AWESOME, but it will also take a whole lot more out of you than you think.
If you’re posting this episode to your feed, edit it! There’s some stuff that fell flat in the room or sounds like awkward futzing around when you play it back. Your podcast audience doesn’t need to hear that. You prepared for this show like a professional; treat the episode the same way.
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Let us know what your DIY live show was like, or if you plan to do one after reading this! We’re @Jointhepartypod on Twitter. Our other resources for podcasters are all at http://multitude.productions.
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