Music Funding 101
Regional Sponsorships
As stated in the local-sponsorship article, most sponsorships are going to be local, but the beauty of the Web and TalentFunding.com is that you can search for people outside your locality, and do so easily. The primary reason for a band to look for a regional sponsor is that it opens up the world of potential sponsors which can be approached; it's a far larger list than would be available in just the band's hometown. Let's look at when you might consider going regional or beyond:
First, "regional" can be defined as your city plus your part of the state, or maybe the surrounding three or four states. For bands, "regional" usually means the distance that they can drive and tour during a weekend. For sponsors, it means the area where the sponsor’s products or services are available. However, when searching for a regional band or sponsor on TalentFunding.com, you need to be careful not to confuse "regional" with "remote local".
Regional is where one band or one sponsor is covering the entire regional area, by themselves. "Remote local" is where a band in one market is being sponsored in another market by a sponsor that is local to that second market. For example, the XYZ band might be based in New York, but they find a sponsor in Boston that only has products in Boston. The sponsor wants all the shows to be local to Boston, so the band will have to drive to Boston each time. That Boston sponsor is a "remote local" sponsor for the New York band.
In dense parts of the country, by looking regionally you can find fifty to a hundred times as many prospective people than if you stayed local. For regional and remote-local sponsors, the desire to look outside their hometown is to have a better chance of finding the "right" band that fits what the sponsor really wants. These sponsors feel they have seen or heard most of the bands in their local city, and none offer what they want.
But regional (larger) sponsors need two things which are very difficult for most bands to deliver: a proven ability to tour outside the band's hometown for long periods, and someone to negotiate with who is business-like and who understands marketing and sponsorship. It's at the regional stage that a band would be well served by having a funding rep to do the business talking for them. The experience in touring, however, can only be accomplished by having done it before (on the band's own dime).
While an independent record label is usually needed for a "regular" (non-sponsored) regionally touring band, a sponsored band can circumvent a lot of the need for such a label. A label normally funds and organizes the band's marketing; however a sponsored band has its sponsorship to pay for the majority of the marketing. Thus a regionally touring band, if they understand music business fundamentals, can do their own marketing. However if the band is weak in this area, they might do well to work with an indie label.
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