Venues - Tips for searching Gig Venues

Playing live is key and our Venues section will help you find gig venues across the UK regularly hosting unsigned band nights, showcases, open mic events and offering support slots.

Depending on whether you want to book a local gig or a UK tour, you can search our Venue listings by region and/or city and town to find the most suitable locations.

You can also filter Venue listings by capacity to find the right sized places to play.

Tips for contacting Venues

Before getting in touch with venues we strongly suggest that you take 10 minutes or so to look at the website and/or social media profiles and read our listing details thoroughly to ensure the venue in question caters for your style of music.

Please also read our blog ‘Get The Lowdown on Gig Promoters’ here - http://members.theunsignedguide.com/blog/467 so you are clued up on how various gigs and nights work financially and in terms of bringing an audience, and to ensure you don’t fall into the ‘pay to play’ trap.

Live music venues receive a large amount of enquiries from bands and artists wanting to make bookings so make sure you double check the info in our listing about how they prefer to receive music submissions so it has the best chance to being heard. Allow at least 6 weeks for a response, it is fine to politely follow up after this.

What’s in a Venue listing?

• Contact details
• Social media profiles (where applicable)
• Gig Booking contact name(s)
• Genres they specialise in
• How regularly they host live music/the types of nights & events they put on
• Whether live music is organised by the venue itself or external promoters
• Whether an in-house PA is provided or not
• Where you can submit demos and what format they prefer to receive

NB. Please note The Unsigned Guide can only publish the contact details and information that each individual company gives us permission to make publicly available so the level of detail in some listings can vary. We do our best to encourage companies and individuals listed to give as much info as possible to make sure the listings are helpful to you.

Further reading & advice

Follow the links below to documents & articles that we think can further help you covering how to best approach venues, mastering a great biog to send out, and info on the promoter – band relationship:

Get the lowdown on gig promoters http://members.theunsignedguide.com/blog/467

Top 5 mistakes bands make in their biogs http://members.theunsignedguide.com/blog/510

The Unsigned Guide’s Top Tips for Approaching Music Companies http://members.theunsignedguide.com/blog/331

BPI Music Industry Maps http://members.theunsignedguide.com/category/management/ytmi/316