The Live Music Business

Management and Production of Concerts and Festivals

Andy Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000482935
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music & Business

The Live Music Business: Management and Production of Concerts and Festivals, Third Edition, shines a light on the enigmatic live music business, offering a wealth of inside advice and trade secrets to artists and bands looking to make a living in the industry. Previously published as The Tour Book, this new edition has been extensively revised, reorganized, and updated to reflect today's music industry.

This practical guidebook examines the roles of the key players – from booking agents to concert promoters, artist managers to talent buyers – and the deals, conventions, and processes that drive this global business. Written by a touring professional with over 25 years of experience, this book elucidates why playing live is crucial to the success of any musician, band, or artist, explaining issues like:

• what managers, promoters, and agents do and how they arrange shows and tours;
• how to understand and negotiate show contracts;
• how to create a contract rider, and how the rider affects the money you earn from a show;
• how to appear professional and knowledgeable in an industry with its own conventions, language, and baffling technical terms; and
• a three-year plan using live performance to kickstart your music career

Intended for music artists and students, The Live Music Business presents proven live-music career strategies, covering every aspect of putting on a live show, from rehearsing and soundchecks to promotions, marketing, and contracts. In an era when performing live is more essential than ever, this is the go-to guidebook for getting your show on the road and making a living from music.

Part One

Live Music Management

DOI: 10.4324/9781003019503-1

Live music is big business. Any examination of an industry usually includes an assessment of the worth of that industry or market segment. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a consultancy, value live music (ticket sales and related sponsorships) as being worth $30 billion by 2022 – of which over $24 billion will be from ticket sales.¹ Pollstar, an industry trade paper, reported that gross ticket sales from the top 100 tours of 2019 was $5.5 billion.² The forecast might be unrealistic: $22 billion worth of tickets need to be sold in the next four years if the PwC figures are to be achieved.

Whatever the predicted worth of the business, the value to an artist entering the industry must be valued using different metrics – that of the promotional possibilities and the revenue it will bring to that particular artist.

This section will introduce you to the key players in the organisation and management of the live music business – the artists, the artist mangers, the booking agents, and the talent buyers/concert promoters.³ Figure P1.1 shows the relationship of these key players all revolving round the artist.

Figure P1.1 The key players in the organisation and management of the live music business

NOTES

1. PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2019. Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2019–2023 – Getting Personal: Putting the Me in Entertainment and Media. PwC. URL https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/entertainment-media/outlook-2019/entertainment-and-media-outlook-perspectives-2019-2023.pdf (accessed 11.11.19). https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/tmt/media/outlook.html.
2. Pollstar 2019 Year End Special [WWW Document], n.d. URL https://www.pollstar.com/specialedition/pollstar-2019-year-end-special-142982 (accessed 9.29.20).
3. Concert promoter is the more common term used to describe talent buyers and one used from now on in this text.

Chapter 1 The Artists

DOI: 10.4324/9781003019503-2

Chapter Outline

The importance of live performance

Live performance as a promotional activity

Live performance as a major revenue stream

A significant revenue stream if costs are low

The importance of live performance based on genre

Live performance enables an accelerated timeline of success

Notes

The three parts of the music business (recorded, publishing, and live) revolve around the artist. The artist creates the “product” – songs and performances – which generate revenue in the respective business areas. Revenue in the live music business is generated primarily from selling concert tickets for performances at one-off shows, on concert tours, and at festivals. The key players identified in Figure P1.1 will all receive a portion of the ticket sales, and some key players will be able to generate ancillary income from the artist’s live activity. But it is the artist who drives the business – the ability of an artist to sell concert tickets, thus “spinning the wheel” of further income generation, is of foremost importance. Selling tickets is not only an income stream. Artists and their managers view the ability to sell tickets as an indicator of the connection between the artist and the fans. The number of streams and YouTube views for a particular artist may reach the millions but “there isn’t any shortcut to selling tickets. You have to go through a process of development and building an audience”, according to Harry McGee, an artist manager.¹ Artists agree. “There are a lot of artists with millions of streams worldwide because they have got on some play list”, says Victoria Hesketh, who performs as Little Boots, “but they couldn’t put a gig on and sell ten tickets”.²

The views of artists and their managers may contain sweeping statements, and it is clear there are two benefits from live performance. The first is an income stream which may well exceed that from recorded music (streams, downloads, and physical sales). The second benefit is the relationship between the artist and the fan. Buying a concert ticket shows a deeper connection with the artist than that of following them on social media or adding a song to a play list. These two benefits should therefore be acknowledged in any artist’s career planning. This is true regardless of the career stage the artist finds themselves. Figure 1.1 shows a timeline of an artist’s career and the contribution live performance makes at each stage.

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