Flyering: Madison tradition, or "almost pointless"?

So much of what's done to promote music these days seems to have a "just in case" or "why not?" mentality behind it: palming 10 stickers off on someone who comes to the merch table, comment-spamming all your MySpace friends, giving some reviewer multiple copies of the same CD. And some promotional tactics seem more and more like outdated reflexes—especially pounding the pavement for hours at a time to tape up flyers on kiosks in the State Street and Willy Street areas, on telephone poles, and in shop windows. But Madison's flyer kiosks continue to molt and grow new coats of multicolored copy paper several times a week. What do local promoters and venue owners get out of this increasingly quaint practice?

"Ten years ago, [flyering] was one of the main ways that we got the word about shows, and now I sometimes question whether it's even worth it at all to put out flyers," says Cathy Dethmers, owner and booker at the High Noon Saloon, which still has one of the more consistent street teams in town. Former Café Montmartre booker and Blueheels guitarist Justin Bricco, who's used to marching from the end of Willy Street to the end of State Street with a backpack full of flyers, says he was once even chided by a woman on the street for using non-biodegradable tape. Tag Evers of promotions company True Endeavors is pretty quick to admit that it can seem futile: "The half-life of a poster on State Street is about 20 minutes, and in the age of Facebook and Twitter, the kiosks are kinda anachronistic, almost pointless," he says in an e-mail. "Still, we do it, mainly out of habit."

It seems no one's entirely pro-flyering, yet a scrappy hopefulness continues to motivate the habit. Scott Leslie of the Majestic Theatre points out that keeping a good amount of flyers out there can at least "make your venue look alive." Leslie's business partner Matt Gerding mostly just hopes the venue's flyers "catch the attention of 20 or so fence-sitters for every show. And sometimes 20 tickets can mean the difference between making or losing money on a show. But those people might go to two shows all year long."

Flyering is also an elusive public gesture for punk houses and basement-show promoters who otherwise don't seek to advertise that broadly. Ben Gretenhart, who's played (most recently in The Transgressions) and promoted shows at both underground venues and more conventional ones like the Corral Room, thinks putting up a house show's address or phone number on a flyer might be less risky than putting it online. What's more important is just "getting a reputation so that people know the name, so that people don't have to advertise the address," he says, though he concedes that Madison police "aren't gonna hassle you unless someone from the community complains."

The rules of flyering aren't formally defined, beyond the simple courtesy of not covering up a notice for an event that hasn't happened yet, but conflicts and drama still arise. It's not uncommon to see a kiosk paved over with a grid of anywhere from six to 20 "Jobs for the environment!" or Bible-study flyers. It's also not uncommon for most of those to get covered up or torn down by the end of the day. These outside groups seem a little oblivious to the informal concert-flyer system of etiquette, which just makes them more likely to get recycled in the free-for-all.

It's impossible to really define boundaries or territory, though True Endeavors' flyers persistently ring the top row of most poster kiosks on most days, to the mild irritation of some other flyer folk. But amid the competition, says Leslie, "I think all the respect venues and promoters show each other with regard to flyering might be the most respectful thing they do with each other in all their interactions."

Still, if you're going to do it, you might as well seek out some space outside of the overcrowded kiosks. Bricco spent a lot of time asking local businesses to let him put up flyers in their windows or behind their counters. His regular spots included such utterly rock 'n' roll stores as bathing-product boutique The Soap Opera on State Street. Bricco also once ended up covering some of the High Noon's flyers while doing some work for the Majestic, which led to some friction: "It wasn't intentional. I was just blindly on a mission to promote a show. I brought [Dethmers] flowers."