Illustration by Janeé Auger

Ever since MP3 culture robbed musicians of their ability to pay the bills with album sales, touring has become one of the only viable ways for bands to make ends meet. Unfortunately, planning a tour is much harder than uploading a song to the Internet. It’s hard, gruelling work that has touring musicians looking for any way to reduce expenditures.

But now, thanks to a specialized couch-surfing website that connects bands to fans with free places to sleep, touring musicians have one more weapon to add to their budgetary arsenal. Better Than the Van (www.betterthanthevan.com) is the brainchild of Todd Hansen and Scott Miller, two drummers who realized the need for free flophouses during their long days on the road — and long nights suffering in sketchy sleeping quarters.

“Once, we were staying in Arkansas, in Little Rock. We had a show, and ended up staying in a plastic injection molding shed,” Hansen recalls. “It was this big shed full of industrial equipment and a cement floor, and it was brutal.”

Since its creation in July 2008, about 1,800 users from across the globe have joined the site as either a band or a host. “It’s a great idea,” beams Colleen Brown, vocalist/bass player for Edmonton’s all-female rock powerhouse The Secretaries. (By the way, did you know they have a terrific new CD out? Well, they do!) “It seems very simple to post those kinds of things, where it would have been hours of calling people up and asking around before.”

Young bluesman Michael Rault agrees, saying that he will hopefully be able to use the site to save a few bucks when he heads out on a cross-country tour this month with the affable Doug Hoyer.

Brown and Rault are just two of several local musicians trying to make the jump to a touring career, and both would definitely rather find nice free accommodations than spend a couple hundred bucks on a motel room — or sleep in their tour van. Problem is, if you’re not an outgoing person willing to ask strangers if they know of a free place to stay, you’ll be spending a godawful amount of time tossing and turning on the old upholstery.

“Oh man, it’s a bad idea to be shy,” says Brown. “If you’re not the kind of person who would go out and ask the promoter if they have somebody to set you up with a place to stay, you end up sleeping in your car a lot.”

However, Brent Oliver, the local promoter and founder of Foundation Concerts, says these days fewer promoters are putting up bands. The explanation is complicated: promoters factor accommodation fees into the cut they take from shows, meaning that a promoter’s cut will be less if they’re not paying for a hotel room. That might work in an ideal situation where a band can actually find a free place to stay, but if they can’t, they’ll still have to fork out cash for a motel that a promoter would have skimmed in the first place. Oliver says resources like BTTV can help keep that from happening and benefit everyone.

“It makes small bands a lot more powerful,” says Oliver. “I love [BTTV] just for the fact that it creates a good kind of band community, and an industry community, and one of the great things is that people can share stories.”

The more bands who interact with the community, the more they’ll be able to pass along advice about promotion etiquette in the area. For instance, if you book with Oliver to play the Black Dog, don’t book a second show with someone else, or there’ll be hell to pay.

Good advice, but trusting strangers to put you up for a night still has its risks. After all, what kind of person offers to put up a group of rock ’n’ roll strangers in their home — even overnight? Fans and people looking to try something new, says Hansen, who explains that BTTV gives fans a way to connect to the music they love over and above seeing a show or buying an album. It certainly makes better water-cooler conversation at work than recapping last night’s Survivor. But they’re all still strangers.

“You never know who those people are, what their intentions are — if they’re crazy weirdoes,” says Brown, who says she’d feel safer using the service while traveling with a band than as a solo performer.

Hansen acknowledges the potential for problems, but offers assurances that BTTV monitors its members to ensure anyone registered with the site is using it for its intended purpose. The site also allows users to rate each other after encounters to ensure quality control, and Hansen has posted tips on how to be a good host to your band and vice versa.

In the end, even with services like BTTV, it’s up to bands to use their discretion. Even if you’re the most organized band in the world, Rault says, there’s no way to plan a flawless tour. “I’ve always done really haphazard touring,” he concludes. “In order to get started, you have to throw caution to the wind and not really think about it too much, and see what happens to you.”