For venues
The Guild is looking for a small number of Austin rooms to host Guild Live on a recurring basis. The proposition is simple: the Guild brings the artists, the audience and the marketing, and pays the bands itself. The room brings the room.
What you get
- Verified artists. Every act on a Guild bill has been vetted — draw, genre, lineup size, and whether they turn up. You are not gambling the night on an unknown quantity.
- An audience that already exists. Guild members attend free and attend habitually. Your night starts with people in it before a public ticket is sold.
- Marketing you did not pay for. Design, listings, paid and organic social, the member newsletter, presale and press. Your room is named and linked on every piece of it.
- Bar traffic. The Guild's job is to put people in front of your bar and keep them there for three hours. On most live nights that is where the room's money actually is.
- No booking admin. The Guild contracts the artists, pays the guarantees, handles the ticketing, staffs the door alongside you and settles afterwards. There is no door dispute at one in the morning because there is one payer.
- A profile and a listing on the Guild site with your booking contact, plus access to the verified artist roster for the nights the Guild is not there.
- Consistency. A recurring series in your calendar, themed by genre, run to the same standard every time.
What you provide
- The room on agreed dates, with an agreed capacity and curfew
- The bar and the staff to run it
- House production where you have it, or access for the Guild to bring its own
- Door and security staffing, or an agreement about who supplies it
- Premises licensing and insurance, which is always the venue's
- Somewhere for cameras to stand — Guild shows are filmed
How the deals are structured
Numbers are agreed room by room, because a 60-seat listening room and a 400-capacity outdoor stage have nothing in common economically. The structure is always one of three, and the Guild is comfortable with any of them.
Room rental
A flat fee for the room. The Guild keeps the door; you keep the bar and know your number before anyone arrives. No exposure to whether the band draws.
Door split
An agreed percentage of ticket revenue, usually after production costs. Both sides share the same outcome. It requires agreeing in advance what counts as a production cost and who counts the door — which the Guild would rather settle in writing than at the end of the night.
Bar percentage
No room fee, no door share; the venue pays the Guild a percentage of bar sales instead. The best fit for rooms whose economics are entirely about drinks, and the structure that aligns the two parties most tightly.
In all three, the artist guarantee is fixed and paid by the Guild. It is never the line that absorbs a quiet night.
What the first conversation covers
Capacity, curfew, which nights are usually open, what production the room has in house, how the door is normally staffed, and what a good night looks like at your bar. The commercial structure comes after that, because it should follow the room rather than the other way round.
Existing partner rooms
The Guild currently works with The Far Out Lounge, Sagebrush, and its own space, The Ballroom at Mythic. Different sizes, different characters, different deals — which is deliberate, because a series that can only work in one kind of room is not a series.
To start, use the contact page and include capacity, address, in-house production and your usual open nights. There is more detail on the reasoning in the Journal piece on what a venue partner gets.