In comparison, smaller touring artists usually only have a handful of people to help with stage set-up, and independent artists usually are forced to do everything themselves. The amount of time it takes to set up a stage depends on multiple factors, including the size of the venue, the complexity of the production, and the number of people in your road crew.
Packing up the instruments alone is a tedious and time-consuming process that requires careful attention to detail. There are countless wires, power strips, effects pedals, amplifiers, guitars, microphones, speakers, in-ear monitors, and dozens of other instruments like keyboards , that need to be safely packed in road cases to avoid damage or loss in transition.
Performers with any sort of production element to their live-show need to bring along turntables, mixers, sample pads, signal processors, computers, banners, lights, fog machines, projectors, and any number of other tour accessories to ensure that their performance sounds, looks, and feels exactly the way that they intend it to. Once everything is broken down, loading all of that gear into a van or trailer , so it can be transported from city to city, takes someone with serious Tetris skills.
The larger the performance, the more travel space artists need in order to transport every aspect of their live show. After everything has been carefully accounted for and packed away, it then has to be transported to the designated location. But before anyone can actually start setting things up, it all has to be unloaded from the van or trailer into the venue within a very specific window or load time usually designated by the venue or promoter before the show.
On most tours, multiple bands will need to unload their gear and go through the process of setting up, checking equipment, and running sound. When everyone is done, everything else can go on as planned — merch displays can be set up, excess gear or equipment can be loaded back into the van, the bands can leave to find something to eat, etc. If every performer on the bill tried to load-in and set-up at the same time, it would be a disaster.
Or, if nobody showed up until an hour before the show no one would be able to get their equipment set up before the venue would need to open the doors. A typical load schedule on a club tour with 3 bands, where doors open at 8 PM, might look something like this:. Of course, each band is responsible for their own equipment and rarely is any gear shared between bands. Unless mutually agreed upon before the tour starts, each band will have its own drum kit, guitars, amps and any number of other bells and whistles.
This means that all of the equipment for the evening either needs to be loaded onto the stage in layers — ready to be quickly stripped off the stage as each band exits after their performance — or everything needs to be waiting backstage where it can be quickly loaded on and then subsequentially loaded back off as each band performs. In these scenarios, usually, the headlining band gets the highest priority load time and most ideal positioning on stage.
But try to hold the attention of 18, people, and perform really well, for two and a half hours every night. Three of those were peopled with players aged 60 to nearly When it comes to the highest grossing single shows worldwide, four of the top five positions were occupied by a group with players over age 70, while 16 of the top 20 shows featured the same band.
That would be the Rolling Stones, who are about to embark on yet another American jaunt this spring and summer, despite the fact that Mick Jagger had to have heart valve replacement surgery last April.
Especially since the audience who attends shows by older stars has the deepest pockets, raising profits for everyone. And that has increasing consequence for the entire music business, given the paltry revenue generated by modern streaming compared to the hugely lucrative sales of old CDs.
In fact, the revenue the biggest bands create can rival the GDP of a small nation. Top stars can command an — or in some cases, even a — split of the funds from shows, with the lower portions going to the promoter.
The job of the booking agent itself is very easy to define: the agent represents the artist across the live industry. Their goal is to book the tour and sell the shows to the local talent buyers, finding the venue and negotiating the price. Promoters are the side of the live business that funds the tour and buys the shows. The landscape of concert promotion is complex, and promoters themselves come in various shapes and sizes.
To make it a bit simpler, imagine that promoter is a middle-man, connecting the concert space and the artist to put together a show.
You can start building that bridge from either side, however. Tour promoters set out from the artist side, contracting musicians to perform a series of concerts, paying for rehearsals, audiovisual production, covering the travel expenses and so on. Local promoters, in their turn, embark from a concert space. An art-director of a small club, a local group of party promoters, a team of the major US festival — all those event promoters of different scope would fall into that category.
In that context, the role of the agent becomes clear. If promoters are the middle-men on the side of an artist or a concert space, the agent is the middle-man between the middle-men, who builds up the network of promoters on both fronts and artists, serving as a liaison between all sides.
One of the main shifts in the live business is the consolidation of tour and local promoters under the umbrella of entertainment conglomerates, with the most notable examples of Live Nation and AEG. Essentially, these companies have grown their operation to the point where they can build the bridge from both sides, internalizing all the processes. They both produce the concert tours and own or, at least, establish partnerships with a vast network of clubs and arenas, providing venues for the tour.
However, touring under such exclusive promotion remains reserved for the artists of the top echelon — so most of the shows out there are still put together in collaboration between the tour promoters, booking agents and local partners.
Tour managers that stay on the road with the artist's crew are the oil that makes the wheels of the tour spin. Even a nationwide tour involves extremely complex logistics, and it becomes exponentially harder to manage the travel as the tour passes onto an international level.
Getting the band from point A to point B seems to be a pretty straightforward job, but in fact, the routine of the tour manager is dealing with unexpected and solving a dozen of new problems each day — all while keeping the artists happy and ready to perform. To give you a taste of an international tour route, here's an approximate map of the Lizzo's tour in support of "Cuz I Love You" release, stretching over 64 locations and 74, km — and that is just the straight routs, not accounting for the actual roadways.
It takes hard work and expertise to assemble the stage, set up the lights and the sound system, etc. The live industry relies on the tech crew to make the show actually happen. Festivals and venues are at the very core of the live business, providing the space and usually the base infrastructure for the show.
Outdoor events are a distinct part of the live performance landscape. Operated by promotion groups, prominent festivals can introduce artists to new audiences, both in terms of fans and music industry executives — all while offering a fat pay-check.
A major festival performance puts the artist on the map, and the promotional effect of the show itself has to be considered.
It can become even more important than the immediate monetary gain — especially for independent, up-and-coming artists. Although recording and publishing industries are not directly engaged in the live business, we have to remember that the music industry is built on collaboration. By convention, most music tours follow the release of an album, and each artist has to report his set after the show to PROs so that the proper songwriters get paid.
The music industry is made up of separate companies and people working on the different parts of the artist career — and, while not completely aligned, they are always interconnected. The six key parties described above work together to bring the live show to the concert-goers. That said, in the next section we will go through the tour cycle step by step to showcase how all these players interact to create the tour.
As it usually is in the music industry, it all starts with the artist. On the first step, agents and tour promoters find and sign the performer. For some types of artists like DJs, for example touring can be relatively huge, while the recording revenues might stay almost non-existent.
As an average show has to be booked months in advance, tour deals are usually signed around a year prior to the actual performance. At the same time, the vast majority of concert tours follow the recording releases to build up the momentum and ride the promotion wave. That has one unavoidable implication: tour promoters and agents sign the artist to perform the material which is not written yet, which can be quite risky.
That is especially true when it comes to the debut artists, that might not even have a minute set or any solid live performance skills when they get their first touring deal.
There is a lot of gut feeling that goes into scouting on the live industry side — more than in the recording business at least, where licensing deals allowed labels to mediate the risks of the creative stage. At this step, the tour promoter starts the preparations: building the light show and live visual materials, booking rehearsal sessions to perfect the live performance, and so on.
Meanwhile, the artist, manager, agent and tour promoter work out a general timeframe and draft an approximate route of the future tour. The initial tour planning is usually done around priority shows, like major city performances or music festivals, while the rest of the route is defined in broad strokes.
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