Today, we introduce an extremely useful post by Brad Lazarus, which we have scheduled in two separate parts, today and Wednesday.

Brad is founder and MD of LM2 Entertainment, a professional function band management company. Brad also writes extensively on the topic of professional function bands through his LM2 Entertainment blog and recently published an ebook ‘The Greatest Night of Your Life’ – The essential guide to booking the right function band for your event. He shares his knowledge and experience by serving as a mentor and running occasional master classes for music degree level students and alumni looking to pursue a career in the professional function band market at one of London’s foremost music institutions.

We hope you enjoy reading Brad’s useful advice and insights….

I often get asked this question by prospective private clients and event industry professionals alike. The question could do with some clarity so we can look a little deeper into it – “What makes one 6 piece swing band more expensive than another 6 piece swing band”. When I have a conversation with a prospective customer around this question there’s an understanding that one can’t compare function bands purely on the basic metrics of genre, number of personnel in the band etc in the same way that one might compare a commodity product. Commodity products have little to compete on other than price. So there seems to be an understanding that choosing a function band based on price alone is a risky game to play but how does one ascertain the value of comparable bands at different fees.

People tend forget that the market for function bands is like any other market ie it’s subject to the same rules of economics as everything else ie demand and supply. So in its simplest and purest form there may be two comparable bands, one busier and in more demand the than the other, if the band have read the market well and identified this, they’ll put their price up. If they’ve misjudged the market and overpriced themselves the market will ‘tell them’ ie their diary won’t fill up in the same way it did before and they’ll have to make a decision to drop their fees.

Reputation can be a huge value add for a band and influence its fee. Reputation comes from, word of mouth recommendations, testimonials, positive social media comments etc etc. A band that has understood their reputation and its positive effect on the market will likely increase their fee as the client is likely valuing them more than their competition and will probably pay more for that value. But who can deliver such prized customer satisfaction time and again?  This is possible where a well run professional function band is really going to steal a march on the competition and with good reason. 

We hope you have enjoyed Brad’s post and will read the second part on Wednesday.