Unless you're a one-hit-wonder like Foster The People, chances are you're not ready to tour

By Daniel Hopkins

Welcome to Ask a Failed Musician, in which I will help struggling musicians make sense of their careers and even offer some advice. Whether or not it will work, who knows? It obviously didn't work for me. But then again, I was on Kimmel once, so there's that.

Dear Failed,
My band just got back from month-long tour of the U.S. and it was largely unsuccessful. By unsuccessful, I mean nobody came to the shows and we lost money. We expected a better turnout because of songs that were placed in a prominent scenes on Grey's Anatomy and Vampire Diaries. But despite them being shared over a million times on the web, the tour pretty much bombed. What went wrong?

Demoralized in Dallas

You know, Demoralized, you're not alone. Too many new bands think they're ready to go on tour before they actually are. In fact, I'd be willing to guess that of all the live performances that happened in the U.S. last weekend, most of them were poorly attended.

See Also:
Ask a failed musician: Being influential is being successful
Hey, new bands: Stop putting out albums

Take it from these non-failed musicians: Don't put out that album.

To kick this thing off, rather than answering a troubled musician's query, I'll simply give advice to all new bands who are embarking on a musical venture that will result in probable good times and almost certain commercial failure.

Don't put out an album. Seriously. Stop it. Established bands backed by massive marketing machines like U2 or Radiohead can afford to do it. You cannot. Here's the scenario:

You and your bandmates work for a long time to make an album. Some bands can do it in six months, others take longer than a year. It will be expensive, too. You release the album and maybe someone in the local media reviews it.

Then, after a few months, it sinks in: Nobody cares anymore. You have no new music to put out because you just threw every song you had on some expensive record, and you've dropped below the radar.