Hudson Harkins and me during a break at the Jungle Boogie performance at the St. Louis Zoo on July 20, 2012

The original idea of Free Concerts St. Louis was to provide a service to fun-loving and adventurous St. Louisans who wanted to know where to find free, quality musical entertainment. We’ve matured in the short time we’ve been doing this into a service that also caters to the promotional need of the artists and bands.

Here’s a list of why artists love us:

  • We help people find free concerts: Free Concerts St. Louis is another place—in addition to the artist’s website, Facebook page and websites that list free concerts—for people to discover performances. I have plenty of stories about how I discovered bands I never even heard of, and for free! Before this summer I had never heard Vince Martin, Angie Johnson, Ryan Spearman, Abbey Road Warriors… You get the idea.
  • We’re promoters: We not only promote the artist, helping them build their following and success, but we also promote the idea of people getting out, off the couch, giving them an excellent alternative to the vast wasteland that is television. We encourage people to get out to enjoy what artists do best—perform.
  • We help the sponsors: The good people who sponsor free concerts—artists get paid, you know—love to know they are getting a considerable return of investment by having a capacity crowd.
  • We provide more inbound links: I’m a search engine optimization guy. That means I highly value the benefit of search traffic to my website. We put links to the artist website on every event page and our media gallery page. The fact is that the more sites you have linking to your site, the higher your search engine rankings. If we can help a band list higher on Google, Bing, Yahoo, I feel like we’ve added value to the relationship.
  • We create media: Yes, Deb and I love going to concerts. She loves relaxing and enjoying the music, the environment, and the community. I love all that, but even more, I love to shoot photos and video of the performers and the people enjoying the music. We create and post photos and videos on our website, Flickr and on YouTube, and we provide that content to the the artists, encouraging them to link to that media and use it for their own benefit.
  • We are a resource to artists: When we go to shows we try to meet the artists, introducing ourselves as a partner going forward, building a relationship of on-going mutual benefit. We offer a partnership where we trade free promotion for upcoming concerts and a stronger concert-going community and they provide content and experiences we can share with that community. Win-win.

Artists should love us because we’re a free service that promotes the music. If you’re an artist, we encourage you to contact us to schedule a video interview.