This video is about the live music industry, what that term covers, where it came from, what types of business it involves, how musicians interact with the live industry, how musicians make money from the live industry and the support networks that keep it running.
The live industry is the process by which musicians are employed by venues to perform instantly to audiences in order to generate money through ticket sales, merchandising or value-added process such as advertising, endorsing or promoting.
If musicians perform songs for a gathering of people in exchange for money or value, and the performance is happening at the same time the audience is receiving it, then its part of the live music industry.
Music is a hotly debated subject of human evolutonary history. It has been recognised as starting by early humans mimicking the sounds around them in various activities including courtship, hunting activity, or even territorialism, all suggesting an emotion-stimulating communication method. It is well beyond this video to try and find out when the expression of emotion or ability to evoke certain emotion in others changed to an exchange of value and the origins of economic transfer of this type over humans’ 200,000 year lives, so I’ll just say that venues have not always been soley for music performance, and even today we see football stadiums being converted for the largest musical performances.
The live industry in the context of the booming 1950s industry was a promotional effort by the recording industry to sell more albums - artists would tour worldwide so that they would become more well known and in turn boost sales of their records. Lots of money was thrown at these tours and artists enjoyed lavish experiences. This has changed through the noughties (from 2000 onwards) so that productions became more profitable and self-sustainable as recorded music is no longer providing the income to justify the investment on live performances, they have restructured and now run (mostly) more efficiently.
The industry today is dominated by few, very large companies and can involve many hundreds of staff at any one event. The industry side is predominantly covered by the events management discipline, but with some support industries such as royalties collection and lawyers for customs waivers for example.
The business behind the live industry is fairly straight forward. An audience pays for the privilege to see musicians perform live music. Booking agents collect large amounts of musicians together to offer to promoters who match up the artists and the venues – in much the same way A&R reps do for the recording industry – and venues host the musicians and audience so that they make a profit from ticket sales and any beverages or merchandise.
In order to organise this on a larger scale musicians may attend many venues consecutively into what is known as a tour – a collection of gigs in different venues to the maximum amount of audience members. The artists may put on a more elaborate show, including the need for costumes and stage props which need to be set up and packed down for each gig. This brings along a set of staff like drivers to move the equipment from venue to venue, roadies who move equipment into and out of venues, riggers who set up the equipment on the stage, instrument techs who are experts in particular instruments so that they are set up and ready to play for the performing musicians, stage hands who are in charge of equipment being in place at the right time on stage, sound engineers, lighting engineers, special effects engineers, who look after the technical delivery and sound reinforcement of each show and extra (normally) locally contracted security staff. This has not included the support staff like dancers, choreographers, make-up artists, and for some younger stars, teachers!
These have to be managed and organised by an expert called a tour manager who is the direct liason with their employer, normally the record label, and their client, the musician. The Tour Manager is also responsible for the finances and regulating the budget given to them by the record label – although on larger tours they will delegate this to an accounting assistant to keep track of the finances. On larger productions the on-stage staff have to be managed by a stage manager and a logistics manager will maintain all the staff involved with setup, transport and packdown.
The tour manager and the record label will be in contact with various different promoters who have their own geographical ‘patch’ of expertise for attracting audiences to certain genres of music – some tours can end with a different promoter on a different pay rate for every venue of a 50+ venue tour!
A musician’s experience of the live music industry is usually fairly hectic. On small gigs they will be in charge of the booking, promoting and performing themselves leaving not much time for marketing, ticketing, promotion, and then delivery of a good event! Larger events involve a long lead-up time of intense preparation – don’t forget live events have changed from being solely promotional exercises for new albums from record labels to having to be profitable themselves, and many have investors to answer to meaning they must present a working business model for the tour before the full funding is released for them.
By the time musicians arrive at venues where all the equipment is set up, the staff are in place and the final preparations (and resolutions of some random unpredicted event that ALWAYS happens just before the gig) the extent of the planning that took place can be missed. Of course the sign of a good tour manager is one who is always calm and in control, as they are a project manager for a high-value project sometimes on display to hundreds of thousands of people with a reputation to uphold for many different stakeholders, the musicians, the record label, the entertainment company backing them, the logistics supplier, sometimes even the country they have arrived from. This explains why tour managers can sometimes be a little short with musicians. As long as you bear in mind the amount of leg work they have to do behind the scenes, all should be magical.
Before you get a gig you will either know venues directly, be with a booking agent who recommends you for gigs or a record label or publishing house that puts up the money for you to tour. You will bring on at least one promoter to organise the contracts between artist and venue and a publicist to tell the world about what you are up to. These will be organised by your business manager if you are lucky enough to have on. The agreement you make with the venue on what date, what songs, what conditions,all in a checklist form known as a rider. So for example, to ensure a DJ gets 2 Technics 1210s and a Pioneer club mixer, they will submit a technical rider with their performance contract. If they aren’t there, the contract is null and void and the artist doesn’t play. The contract will include an artist rider, or a list of items the artist requires from the venue as a condition of the performance. These have ended up being pretty stupid requests in the past, the most famous being from Van Halen’s request that a bowl of M&Ms was in their dressing room at every venue, which David Lee Roth later stated was just a test to see how well the venue read the contract; apparently just before this became their policy one of the stage hands for the band had nearly been killed by dangerous working conditions at one venue. As long as the request is legal, nothing is too obscure or too ridiculous.
The pre-promotion of the event may involve going to each area where you will be performing to do local radio interviews and press interviews so that you prepare the audience to buy your tickets, as well as setting up local competitions or even battle of the bands to focus and engage your target audience. A battle of the bands is a good way of hijacking the fans of a good local band so that you may impact on a specific scene in one particular area, other promotional methods include more online competitions, voting and commenting polls for customisation of touring so that fans can speak directly with artists.
Now, onto the musicians’ experience on the day:
You will turn up for the gig through a private entrance away from the public, be warmly received into a comfortable dressing room to prepare and warm up, supplied with the items you requested on your performance rider then when the time is right you will be called by the stage manager to the green room, a room off to one side of the main stage in which you do your final preparations and warm up. The stage manager will tell you your set length or the amount of time you have to perform songs before its time to come off, and you perform! Your artist manager will make a note of which songs you performed to submit to your publishing company so you can get some performance royalties and on longer tours after the performance you will meet competition winners, sign merchandise and do a quick press interview for a couple of local news publications, organised by your publicist.
Musicians make money from a combination of taking some of the ticket sales, refreshment sales, merchandise sales, performance royalties and can also make money from recording the gig to sell a ‘live performance’ album and receive mechanical royalties. You can do this by making sure every one of your songs is registered with your country’s royalty collection society as your work, then, once you’ve played a gig, make a note of the date, the songs performed, who they are by and get the venue manager to sign that it is correct. This can then be submitted to your royalty collection society to boost your performance royalty payments, which is an easy way to get another income stream! The fastest way for smaller artists to generate extra money is in merchandising, and that will prosper from successful branding and great design for your fans.
This video has not explained the history of the music industry, the recording industry or the publishing industry as well as support services to the industry or many pioneers in the music industry, as well as different job roles available, or step by step guides to becoming a musician in todays industry, all of which are covered in more detail on my website theosmithmusic.com
I hope you found this useful so you can crack on and don’t forget to let people you think will benefit know about it!
Theo Smith
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