Weekly bands: the most valuable customer a studio has

Compare two bands who each buy 48 hours a year. One books ad hoc, whenever they can agree a date. The other takes Tuesday 8pm every week. The second is worth considerably more, and not because of the money — it is the same money.

It is worth more because it takes an hour off your sales problem permanently, because it fills a slot you can then build the rest of the evening around, and because a band with a standing arrangement has made your studio part of their week rather than a place they use. The churn on a weekly slot is far lower than on ad-hoc booking, for the same reason a gym membership outlives a day pass.

It is also the part of a studio that is hardest to move. When a studio changes booking system, the weekly slots are the thing that breaks and the thing customers notice. That is worth remembering before you change anything.

A weekly band should pay less per hour than a stranger booking the same room, and the discount should be paid for by the certainty rather than given away as goodwill. Two structures work.

The first is a straightforward rate for the series: they commit to a term — a school term, a quarter, twelve weeks — and the whole term is priced at a lower hourly rate. The commitment is real and so is the discount.

The second is a block of hours bought up front, used against the standing slot week by week. It is more flexible for the band and better for your cash flow, and it handles the skipped weeks naturally because an unused hour is still theirs.

What does not work is an open-ended discount with no term. It leaves you unable to re-price the slot without a difficult conversation, and difficult conversations get postponed until the rate is three years out of date.

A standing arrangement has to actually occupy the calendar, far enough ahead that nobody else can take it. A note that says 'Tuesdays are the band's' is not a booking, and it will be sold out from under them by somebody clicking on a website at midnight.

How far ahead is a judgement. Too short and you have a race every month; too long and you have committed a room for a year, which makes re-pricing and re-planning painful. A rolling window of a couple of months is usually the right shape: always booked ahead, never booked forever.

Whatever the window, the sessions should be real bookings with real prices attached. The price a session was booked at belongs on that session, so a rate rise applies to the sessions generated after it and not to the ones a band already has.

Every weekly band misses weeks: holidays, illness, a gig, Christmas. How you handle those is most of what determines whether the arrangement survives.

The cleanest rule is that a skipped week is a cancellation like any other and goes through the same notice periods. Tell you a fortnight out and it costs nothing; tell you at 6pm and it does not. That is easy to explain and it is the same rule everyone else gets.

The alternative — a fixed number of free skips a term — is friendlier and harder to administer. If you do it, write down the number, because 'we're usually flexible' becomes 'they always get it free' within a term.

Cancelling a single week must never disturb the rest of the arrangement, and cancelling the arrangement must never disturb the weeks already played. Those two properties sound obvious and are the ones a repeating calendar event gets wrong.

Bands move. The drummer changes job and Tuesday becomes Thursday. The right behaviour is that the change applies from now on and leaves history alone: the sessions already played were played, were charged, and are not up for revision.

Treat a change of room, time or day as an edit to the arrangement rather than a cancellation and a rebooking. Cancelling and rebooking loses the slot for the moment it takes, and on a popular hour that moment is enough.

If you are moving studios onto new software, do the weekly bands last, do them by hand, and keep the old system running until they are all across. They are the customers who will notice a mistake and the customers you can least afford to annoy.

Tell them it is happening before it happens, and give them the slot in writing. A band that arrives to find their room booked by somebody else does not care whose migration script was at fault.