Bazaar Café is the home away from home for many talented Bay Area songwriters and musicians. The warm, intimate atmosphere is a perfect setting for the acoustic, original music we feature (originals & public domain only!). This is a listening space. During songs, we hold off on the latte steaming, chatty kathy’s gather outside – we came for the sound!
To play a show at Bazaar
1 We generally book local, Bay Area performers. Out-of-area performers are welcome, especially if they team up with a local performer, and show that they have some support in the area. Availability permitting, our home attic is offered to house traveling musicians, to help keep those tour costs down (again, we’ll ask that a local performer vouch for you).
2 If you are a local performer and haven’t been to the café, stop by during a performance and see if our place is a good fit for you and your music.
3. Perform at Thursday open mic (preferred, see Open Mic procedures) OR send a press kit (email is fine). Performing at open mic isn’t a hard requirement, but encouraged. If you have a strong following and feel confident we’ll fall in love with your music, by all means email us. It’s just that a strong showing at open mic makes it a very quick & easy decision.
4. Check the Bazaar Cafe calendar for available slots, and suggest available times when you ask about performing. https://bazaarcafe.com/calendar/
Performance Guidelines
1. Only original or non-copyrighted material may be performed.
2. We typically run only “unplugged” performances. Light-touch amplification can be considered for select voices (the room doesn’t need it and the unplugged nature enhances the intimacy of performances). No hiding behind a mic! Keyboards are welcome (you can of course play the piano). If we agree that amplification/reverb is warranted, the house manager has the final say on volume – again, mostly because the room has beautiful acoustics by itself and a very, very light touch is needed.
If your show is in the garden and amplification is used, we ask that sound is kept at 60Db or below (NIOSH is a good free iPhone app for checking) … song usually travels through the small garden just fine. The idea is just to lift vocals a tad. Think Whisperfest.
After you are booked
You’ve got to do some legwork!
Please don’t dilute your audience by booking other shows within the city, within 15 days around your Bazaar show, unless you’re very sure you’ll have at least 15-ish audience members.
We: Publish/send our calendar to local media outlets, promote through our web site, Facebook and other social media and in the café. Note: Sign up for our newsletter so you can see your show if mentioned, or forward it to friends&fans in the city.
You must: Promote the heck out of your show.
- Fans/friends via email, phone calls, your social network outlets and any other media you are connected with.
- Distribute flyers in the area – we’re slowly building out a hyper-local audience in the neighborhood, you’re helping to pay that forward! We can partner with you on flyer costs (around $20, Walgreens photo specials work well) and have a list of community notice boards. We try to make a cafe flyer and have a flyer-distribution & BBQ volunteer event, the first weekend of each month. Join us if you can!
- Make some Insta reels /content available, and we’ll try to incorporate this in our posts in the weeks before the show. We’re also experimenting with doing playlists etc of upcoming shows. Make sure you have some good song snippets on Instagram that we can pick up.
- Do a Facebook event, sf-funcheap, and relevant spots
Time/duration of performances:
Garden shows: generally 3pm-6pm on Saturday/Sunday.
Evening shows generally 7pm – 9:30pm, Friday/Saturday. Doors open 6:30.
Show Remuneration:
>You can run your show as a tipped/suggested donation/ ticketed show. If ticketed, we can sell tickets via our online shop. If so, we need to add sales tax.
>All tips&tickets go to the performers.
>We do appreciate if you tip out the cafe’s events volunteer if you’ve had a good night!
>If it’s a full show and the cafe has covered its base costs for the evening, we will augment the performer tip jar. (for those who love math – imagine the average guest spends $10. 30% cost of sales. 2 helpers at ~$20/hour for 5 hours. What’s left, is for sharing & rent.)
>To accommodate guests who don’t have cash but still want to pay you, we recommend you bring a QR Code printout to stick to the tip jar! Venmo/paypal/zelle etc.
>The core performers get a family style dinner and a drink, on the house. (We try to feed all but if you have more than 5 performers we’ll scale back to a house drink or something simple).
Licensing Royalties
Even though all musicians at Bazaar only play original and public domain songs (we’re strict about that!!), we pay the equivalent of $22 per show to the three four royalty agencies. Yikes! Those are precious dollars to a small venue trying to break even.
If ANY of your songs are registered (eg you released them through bandcamp or spotify) PLEASE get set up, and claim your plays from them!! You should get between $1 & $2 per song played live, we tested it! Don’t leave money on the table, register and claim your plays. If the dollars we pay to these royalty agencies go straight back to performers, that’s the ideal scenario.
Tell us (and/or the world) what you get, we’d LOVE to see a transparency in royalties movement flourish!