Music Funding 101
Email
Bands know very well how useful email is (especially mass email) in getting fans to go to shows. Unfortunately, getting a sponsor to pay for being part of these emails is not something that a band is going to find very easy to do. This is because of two reasons: Sponsors have no idea how many people are really seeing the band's email, and, the sponsors can't see it in action. Compare this with t-shirts: Sponsors can see and feel and count the stacks of shirts, and can see the shirts in action on the street when people are wearing them. Although the band's emails might actually reach more eyeballs than the shirts do, it just takes too much sales experience to be able to convince a sponsor that he should pay for the emails. (People with those sales skills usually go to work for Yahoo.)
Therefore, it's recommended that any email or band-site-related promotion be used as a "bonus" to the regular items that the band has to offer for a sponsorship. In other words, the band can sell the sponsor on buying t-shirts, and the band can throw-in the sponsor's name at the bottom of its emails for free if the sponsor pays before the end of the month. Selling advertising and sponsorships is hard enough; the band should not waste time trying to sell the most difficult of all ad sales: email.
As for the operation of the band's email, the band should make sure that every person that comes into every show gets asked what his or her email address is, and also what their zip (postal) code is. If you have a list of fan emails and zip codes, you can sort them by zip code (using Microsoft Excel or any database or spreadsheet program) and select only the fans in the nearby zip codes. Most countries have postal codes, but if yours does not, just put the name of the town that the band is performing at. Zip codes become important in larger cities where the band may be doing many, many shows in a short time span. Since most fans don't want to drive too far, the band can segment their city according to the zip code and take three to six months to complete all the different areas in the city without inviting everyone to every show.
As for the setup of the mass email, this should be obvious: Always mail to your fans individually, not all together on the same line (bob@aol.com, mary@yahoo.com, tom@comcast.net, etc). Get one of the little "personal mailers" that sends to each person one-by-one. A slightly better mailer, or one of the contact management programs or sites, will let you select the area codes you want to email to, and will then send the emails one-by-one to each person in those areas only.
Then there is the spam that you start getting if you have your own domain. I don't recommend using one of those block-all filters like Earthlink uses (where every single person who emails the band has to fill out a test code or question) because many fans just won't do it, or they'll never even get the notice because the notice itself was blocked by THEIR spam filter. Besides, since the band will be using their email to also contact clubs and other less-than-patient people, it's just better to not make anyone fill out forms.
Some bands just try to change their email address whenever they start getting too much spam. But this causes a problem: The band is trying to build a network of contacts, largely by email, and you can't do that if you keep changing your address (people won't be able to find you.) However the longer you keep the same email address, the more spam you get. So what to do?
The best approach, if the band has their own domain, is to get a "spam gateway." A spam gateway is just a web service that the webmaster sets up (nothing goes onto your computer itself) and it stops almost all the spam instantly. It does cost a few dollars a month, but when you start losing or deleting important emails because you are getting too much spam, you have to do it. TalentFunding.com and Radio-Media.com both use spam gateways.
If the band does not have their own domain, then they should probably wait until they do before they start building up a fan list. You don't want fans to get used to getting emails from the band from one address and then change that address when the band gets a domain. You'll lose a lot of fans that way; changing addresses is not good.
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