Speaking

Tours & House Shows

An info sheet for anyone interested in hosting a talk in their home, community space, or venue.

What is a house show?

House shows are delightful events where, instead of performing at a concert hall, bar, theater, or other venue, musicians or other performers (in my case, a speaker) perform in someone’s house.

That might mean in their living room, in their backyard, or even someplace that’s not literally a house, but which has a house-like vibe: their church, a community center, etc.

What’s the point of a house show?

They tend to take place in more intimate spaces and thus tend to be a substantially different experience. They also generally include meet-and-greets before and after the performance, and sometimes include potlucks, meals, and other add-ons, for fun.

Some hosts play it straight and make it as much like a standard event as possible, while others make it their own and tell everyone to bring their favorite drinks or their favorite dish, or to just bring an appetite so they can enjoy the host’s cooking.

These events are personal, more casual, and generally acoustic rather than equipment-heavy.

How do ticket sales and other money-related things work?

There aren’t typically ticket sales for house shows. Instead, the performer relies on donations from attendees.

It’s kind of assumed those who show up will donate something, usually in the neighborhood of $10-20 per person. But this flexibility allows folks who are short on cash to still attend and have a good time, allows those who want to give more than that to do so, and allows the event to be technically non-commercial, so no laws are broken by having such an event in a residential space.

A variation on the default donation model, called a “guarantee show,” is for hosts who want to treat their guests to a performance in their home by paying a set amount to the performer (similar to how some performers are paid by conference organizers or businesses). In other cases, the hosts will pay that set amount, but with the intention of gathering up funds from attendees later (like having one person pay for a meal to keep things simple, but then everyone Venmos them their portion of the check).

The donation route is more common for this type of show, and folks who find this sort of setup compelling are generally happy to shell out for such an experience (especially when they know their money is directly supporting the performer, not a bunch of middlemen). But preferences and circumstances vary, and there are pros and cons to both primary approaches. The low overhead cost and lack of middlemen can make these sorts of shows, though humble, decent money-makers for performers and reasonable expenditures for hosts and attendees.

What about promotion and merch?

Usually these events are not made widely known to the public. The host is someone who digs the performer’s work enough that they want to share it with their friends. So the host is in charge of getting people to show up, by inviting friends and friends-of-friends, which helps ensure that a certain number of people will be in attendance, while also ensuring there aren’t a lot of random strangers (potential murderers and thieves?!) wandering around the host’s home.

In some cases hosts will be comfortable with promotion, in which case the performer will typically promote the event, but not publish the address. Anyone who’s interested in attending, then, would have to contact the performer for that information, which adds a bit of a buffer so that randos from the internet don’t ruin an otherwise pleasant and cozy event.

There’s generally also some kind of merchandise available for sale: in the case of musicians, that means CDs and t-shirts, and in the case of authors, that means books.

What does the schedule look like for something like this?

If you wanted to have me give a talk that starts at 7pm, the night would probably look like this:

5pm: I would show up to meet you and prepare
6pm: Attendees would start arriving and everyone would be able to hobnob, perhaps eat or drink, before the performance
7pm: The talk would begin, right on schedule
8:30: The talk and Q&A would end, and we’d all hang out and chat for as long as makes sense for everyone’s schedule

So there’s a chunk of time beforehand for me to meet with you and get to know the space, and another chunk of time for people to arrive and for everyone to hang out and enjoy each other’s company.

Then the talk begins, which in my case will be about 40 minutes long, followed by what usually ends up being another 40 minutes of Q&A.

After that, it’s smart to have a semi-official end-point for the night for people to keep in mind. That way people can hang out, enjoy some conversation, eat and drink, but still have a sense of the host’s priorities and expectations so they can plan accordingly.

Anything else I should know right now?

Here are some general things to keep in mind:

• It’s important to have 20 or more adults, minimum, as having fewer than that makes it less of an event and more of a possibly awkward almost-party, which changes the dynamic substantially. It also becomes a lot more difficult to justify the costs of touring once the number of people making donations drops below that level. More than 20 is wonderful. I’ve done a few house shows with closer to 200, and they were great, but 20 is a pretty solid minimum to aim for.
• Note that I said “adults” above: in general, it’s not a good idea to have kids playing nearby during the event, just like with any other speaking event you might attend. It’s no big deal if they’re used to that kind of setting and old enough to pay attention for the duration, or if they’re in another part of the house where they can safely play without being audibly disruptive. But in general, kids playing nearby distract from the presentation, which tends to knock the rhythm of the event off of its optimal path.
• As I mentioned, the event doesn’t need to happen at a house, but the idea here is to keep things as inexpensive as possible, so ideally the space is cheap or free to use. Also optimally it has room for everyone to sit in front of the performer, view unobstructed, without barriers between speaker and audience. It’s no problem if it’s mostly or all floor-seating, or if people bring their own chairs. But having people sequestered in different, even adjacent rooms, or having a bunch of tables or other furniture dividing everyone up tends to mess with the magic and lead to pockets of distraction. Think about how these types of talks are usually set up, with a bunch of people in front of the speaker, facing forward, in the same shared space, and you’ve got a good idea of what we’re aiming for (at least for the presentation portion of the night; anything goes before and after the presentation).
• Based on my experiences and those of people who have done this a lot more than I have, it’s smart to invite at least twice as many people as you hope to have in attendance, and to require RSVPs, rather than telling them to just show up if they want. There’s no need to make it super-formal, but you do want it to feel like a fun, unique event, rather than a casually skipped get-together.
• If you don’t know whether you’d be able to bring 20+ people to such an event by reaching out to friends, colleagues, and other people in your network, consider partnering up with someone else to host, so that you have two networks to draw upon rather than just one. That still allows you to vet the people who’ll be showing up, but also increases the potential audience size and gives you the chance to meet some new friends.

If you have any questions, or if you’re totally into this and keen to start planning a house show, please let me know at colin@colin.io.

I’m also very open to alternative ideas, riffs on the theme, or further thoughts you might have on this concept. The whole point of having these sorts of shows available alongside the more formal, traditional model is to have fun, experiment, and try out some alternative methods of meeting folks and sharing ideas (while also being able to financially sustain those efforts), so I’m all ears if you have ideas you’d like to share.