The Warm Room: Are You an Identity Act or a Mainstream Act?

I want to talk about two different approaches to building an act in this business.

We'll start with an example that will illustrate what I'm talking about, and I'll use this same one the whole way through.

Let's say a young Christian wants to be a professional singer. They're at the beginning, trying to figure out the way, already performing to some degree. And this is their plan: build an act they can play in churches, and tour the country going from church to church. The material will be Christian material, clean, sincere, built out of their faith. And in those churches, they'll be beloved. The congregation will be happy, specifically happy, that a Christian is standing up there singing Christian songs for Christians. Warmest room there is. And there is nothing wrong with that. They're thinking they'll work for churches, the audiences will love them, and everything will be great. And they're right, because it's a warm room.

Let's say they succeed at that, they build that act, and it works. Now take that act, word for word, note for note, and put them somewhere else. Put them on a cruise ship. Put them on stage at a corporate event. Bring them on at a Hell's Angels wedding.

Do you think they'll get the same response?

Maybe… but probably not.

And it's not because they hate the singer. It's not because they hate Christianity. They look at that act and they see the obvious: this is an act that was developed for churches. But they didn't book a church performance. The passenger on that ship got on board for a mainstream show, and a church act isn't that, no matter how good it is inside a church. This act was built for a different room, and every audience outside that room will see it instantly.

So let's step behind the curtain and look at two approaches you can take in this business, mainstream or identity, with the Christian singer being the latter of them.

A mainstream act builds material that will work in any room. It will play today on a cruise ship, and it will play five years from now at a backwater club in a small town in Arizona. That's the job: write universal stuff, create universal stuff, be a universal act.

An identity act puts an identity first and builds the act around it. Around being Christian, around being a minority, around being gay, around whatever identity they themselves feel aligned with. The identity is the foundation, and the act is built on top of it. Different builds, different rooms, different support structures, different paths for making your living. That's not an insult to either one of them.

Being a mainstream act does not mean an act with no identity. You can be a Christian, or a minority, or gay, or whatever you are, and that can have a place in your act. You don't have to pretend you're not those things, and nobody is asking you to. But the act should be good regardless of the identity. If the identity vanished tomorrow, the act should still stand up in the room and do its job. That's the test.

And this is the distinction I'm wanting to make. Some identity acts build an act so fine tuned to audiences who share the same identity that they fail the mainstream test, and they gravitate to the rooms built for that identity. And those rooms are warm. They're proud of you, they support you, they were always going to applaud, because you are one of their own. That's why I call it the warm room. The applause in there is real. And it can be the easiest applause in the business, because you didn't have to win that audience. You arrived to find them already won.

Now ask yourself this: would a specifically church centric performer be the right fit for a general audience at a corporate dinner? Maybe you think that would be fine. And if you do, would you still feel the same if the act was identity forward gay, or trans, atheist, or Islamic? If you said yes, that's great, you have a progressive point of view. But most mixed audiences will not have the same progressive point of view. A typical general (mixed) audience doesn't want to hear a comic preach the Book of Mormon at them, even if he is also kinda funny some of the time. They just want to laugh about relatable things, like grocery prices, and the frustration of driving in rush hour traffic.

An audience is allowed to notice: "Hey, this performance is about somebody's belief, or their identity, and it wasn't made for me." That's not hatred. It's an audience correctly recognizing an act that was built about an identity instead of being built to entertain the random assortment of people in the seats.

Now let's take that same Christian singer to a college booking conference and watch things happen in real time. They do their set, they get some interest. There are Christians in those crowds, and those christian students will find them afterward, excited, asking, "What's your Instagram?" But interest isn't a booking. And most colleges aren't shopping for a specifically Christian artist. They're shopping for performers who can play for their whole crowd, every student on that campus, not one slice of them. So the singer goes home with compliments and a few follows, but no contracts. And they're disappointed, and they wonder why, because people really seemed to dig it.

Now, there might be the occasional Christian school that likes what they did, and the singer might land a couple of bookings from that specialty angle. That's real. But it's also the exception: the warm room, embracing its own.

What's unlikely is that a Christian singer walks out of the booking conference with fifteen or twenty or twenty-five bookings, the way the universal acts can. They just don't have the same universal appeal. The buyers in that room are buying for everybody. And an act built for somebody specific doesn't fit the order.

And it runs the other way just the same. Take a comedian who came up in comedy clubs, writing material that works for anyone and everyone regardless of their background or belief. Put that comedian in a room full of pastors who are looking to bring entertainment to their churches. The comedian will probably still get some laughs. He'll do okay. But more than likely, he's going to offend some people. He's going to say things that are not church friendly. He'll do material that kills in a comedy club and kills on a general purpose stage, but it's a bit too edgy, a little too heavy, for a Christian audience that came looking for a clean show. Maybe he curses. Maybe he gets into subjects that just don't belong there. Same act, same talent, wrong room. It was never about how good they are. It's about what the act was built for.

And the arithmetic underneath it all tells a story. If your act is for one group, that group will be your market. Your bookings, your buyers, your word of mouth, all of it has to come out of that one community. If the community is big enough and loyal enough to carry a career, great. There are many examples of identity acts who've done great doing exactly this. And those careers are real, they get pointed at because they stand-out.

But be aware of the other side of it. If you're finding that you're hitting your head on the ceiling financially, because you can't earn enough inside that smaller community, then you might want to broaden your appeal.

And that's the whole reason I'm writing this. I'm trying to share. I'm trying to give perspective. I'm trying to show you what it looks like from 30 years into the future. I'm not trying to offend anyone, or upset anyone, or belittle anyone, or say that one way of doing it is more deserving than another.

My objective is to help performers make a living as artists, to turn their passion into a paycheck.

This is my objective.

So I have to point this out. I have to tell you that these pathways are different. I have to tell you that building an identity-first act often limits the number of audiences you can play for.

I'm not saying you can't be successful. I'm not saying you can't reach superstardom. I'm not saying you can't make a living. I'm just saying it's different, and that it can be more difficult. I've seen people spend ten years building an act for a specialty crowd, ten years of work and energy, only to find out at the end of it that they can't make a living with that specialty crowd alone.

That's a hard thing to learn a decade in, and it's exactly the thing I'd like you to know ahead of time, right now instead of after.

My own strategy has always been simple: be a great act that can play anywhere, for anyone.

Then, if a specific call comes in that needs a special angle, a children's hospital, a fundraiser, a religious group, a corporate event, I fine tune the act for that one event: the material, the music I use, the verbiage, the jokes I choose. That's easy. I would much rather be an act that can play anywhere and occasionally fine tune material to meet the needs of one audience, than an act that fine tuned everything for one specific audience and now has to try and broaden that material to fit everyone when a mainstream show comes in.

Narrowing a universal act for one night is just craft. Broadening a specialty act to entertain the mainstream often means rebuilding it, and those are very different animals.