How to Book a Tour: 7 Steps & 5 Tips on Getting Ready to Tour 

Musicians usually get into the music industry for the creative side, not the business side, but touring is all about logistics, schedules, planning, and budgeting. That leaves many musicians woefully underprepared for booking a tour. You’ll be out of the studio and into an office-setting, interacting with music professionals of all stripes across different regions, countries, or even continents. The live industry is a complicated business: there are contracts to be signed, timelines to be drawn up, merch to be made, and much more. 

It may seem overwhelming, but don’t worry! We’ve put together this article to give you a step-by-step guide on booking a DIY tour, including all the considerations you’ll need to make and the actions you’ll need to take to put your band on the road. 

How to book a tour for your band

Booking a tour is a hugely complex endeavor, and the bigger the artist, the more complicated it gets. An international tour, for example, brings together booking agents, tour promoters, local promoters, artist’s management team, and labels across multiple countries — all working together to make the tour a success.

But if you are just starting out (and let’s get real here, it’s unlikely that you’re reading this guide if you’re Radiohead), then it’s a whole different ballgame. You don’t have a team of music professionals behind you, so you have to do most of the work yourself, expanding your expertise to cover all the holes. Here’s how you do it. 

1. Find out what are your most active local markets

There’s no point in trying to book a show in a city where no one’s ever heard of you. Start with the local markets that know you best! Instead of asking yourself which are the biggest cities you can tour, ask: in which cities do you have the most fans or listeners? Where can you sell the most tickets?

This is where music data comes in: there are plenty of data tools that include radio airplay trackers and local streaming data so that you can identify the best touring opportunities. A while back, we’ve compiled a list of music tools you can use — so check it out. 

 2. Decide on the target region

With an idea of your strongest local markets drawn from music data, you can clearly define the scope of your tour. Will it be worthwhile for you to go overseas, or just tour across neighboring states or countries? If you’re an American band, will you focus on the US market and travel coast to coast? If you’re a European band, do you want to tour throughout continental Europe? Go wherever you have a fan base big enough so that your show makes financial sense — at least for the venue that’s going to book you.

 3. Set up a date range 

Artists typically sync up their tour with the release of new materials: this allows you to synergize promotion for your tour and album, and ride off any buzz the release generates. But there are other things to consider as well: which date range works for you, personally? Your label, manager, and crew? And, most importantly, which dates work for your fans? For example, you probably don’t want to schedule a show in a college town during the summer when no students are around. 

4. Set up your priorities and then fill up the details

The tour should be scheduled first around your biggest priority shows: the cities where you have the most fans, or a couple of key music festivals. From there, you can look for opportunities and fill in the rest of your tour around these priority shows. If you are headed to your biggest show in Phoenix, Arizona, and your tour bus passes through Flagstaff, and you know you have an audience there, then put together a show! 

 5. Book venues

Again, book venues for your biggest shows first, then fill out the rest of the route. Picking the right venue is a huge challenge: go for a bigger venue, and you might end up playing a half-empty room — go too small, and you’ll leave the fans outside the door, missing out on potential revenue. And those are just the sales considerations: you also want venues that have the right vibe and meet all your requirements. So, do your research! Check the venue databases like Indie On The Move (US-only) or Reverbnation’s venue listing (more international, but less informative).

While you obviously can book your tour by yourself, it might be a good idea to get a couple of booking agents on board to work your priority regions. Booking agents know the local venue landscape and connections with talent buyers, helping you maximize the impact of your show in exchange for a flat percentage of the shows’ revenue. The live industry is built on connections and reputation, so ask around with your fellow artists — chances are someone has a booking agent to refer. 

Contact local promoters and sell the shows — whether directly or through the booking agents! Let the local promoters know how many tickets you anticipate to sell — and bring your EPK (electronic press kit). Also, make sure you negotiate your tech rider before you sign the contract.

5. Once booked, set up your route

Now comes the logistics — you need to plan a route that makes logical sense, which means minimizing travel time and cost as much as possible. Then, get tickets and accommodation and get your equipment into the venue. Make sure to leave yourselves plenty of time to spare as well! You need your last shows to be just as strong as your first, so no burnout. 

6. Start promoting

With your tour booked, route scheduled, and accommodations made, it’s time to start promoting. Post frequently on social media reminding your fans of your tour, send out an email blast, raffle off a pair of free tickets — anything to get noticed and make sure your fans know you’re on tour. 

Collaborating with local promoters and venues for each show is critical when promoting your tour — they might have a lot to offer when it comes to regional promotion channels, including getting you on the radio, advertising at venues, and getting mentions in media. 

7. (Optional) Find local openers

If you don’t have an opening act in mind, draw from local talent! Sometimes, small local bands will be openers for free just because of the exposure, ESPECIALLY if they’re fans of your band. 

5 Tips for setting up a successful tour

If you want your tour to run smoothly, then your mantra should be: plan, plan, plan ahead. Everything from your tour route, to the amount of profit the venue will take, to the merch that you bring needs to be decided and factored in ahead of time. 

1. Keep a tour budget

Before you set out on tour, you need to make sure that the financials work. That means calculating:

• What the promoter/venues will pay you
• Booking agent’s cut
• Cost of the crew
• Cost of backline equipment, if you need any
• Food, lodging and shipping
• Marketing & tour promotion
• Profit split between band members. 

Local promoters might cover some of those costs (like local promo and marketing), but if we’re talking DIY touring, the artists will have to cover most of the expenses (from logistics to lodging). To find out more about how tour’s budget is structured, check out our tour simulation, which provides a simplified but accurate example of the costs involved in an average tour. 

In essence, you will be selling your show to local promoters and venues. The structure of your revenue can be very different. Sometimes local promoters can take up to 100% of the ticket sales — meaning that you get only a flat fee for doing a show. This can be a nice and safe set up for artists — at least in the financial sense — since you get paid even if the show is a flop. 

However, that’s not a rule that applies across the board — you can take a stake in the show’s ticket instead, making up to 80-90% of the tour’s profits. That would be much more risky, obviously, but as it usually is in the music industry, the more the risk — the higher the returns if you succeed. 

From there, you can split your cut between your own crew and the band members. Got roadies going along? Make sure you set up a payment plan for hourly, daily, per show, etc. before you hit the road. Whatever’s leftover is the good stuff: profit (if there is any). Split up the profits however you’d like among the band members, just make sure everyone is on the same page. Don’t be TOO much like Freddie Mercury!

If it’s your first time on tour, don’t think about making a profit too much — even if you don’t make any money, you are working on building your reputation with promoters and developing your audience. If you prove yourself as a professional act that local promoters can rely on and get your fans telling their friends about that kick-ass show they’ve been to, the next tour might be much more profitable.

2. Plan a timeline

When scheduling the timeframe for your tour, you need to make sure that you both keep things running smoothly and efficiently, but allot enough time that you don’t easily fall behind. That means careful planning, all while accounting for potential delays.

The first step of your timeline is to calculate driving/flying time beforehand. This is easy: just plug your route into Google Maps, and you can see how long each leg of the tour is estimated to take. 

It might be tempting to rush everything and keep the tour moving as fast as possible, but for the sake of your sanity (and the sanity of your band/crew), make sure you allow enough time at each location to get set, plus some downtime on top. You’ll need time to check into the hotel, unload gear, eat something, etc. Sound checks are another factor that you have to schedule in. They can take a while, so make sure to arrive at the venue early. 

To nail down your tour timeline, don’t schedule everything so tightly that your tour bus taking a wrong turn will set the whole schedule back. You WILL be slowed down by wrong directions, delays, traffic, and probably a million other things (maybe a bit too much partying? It happens). Factor these setbacks into your timeline. 

3. Plan ahead

Some venues are booked up as much as six months in advance, so to make sure you get the dates you want, start planning as early as possible! We recommend planning at least eight months ahead to ensure the whole process goes smoothly. Sure, there are examples of tours thrown together in 3 months, but that’s hardly ideal, and there’s nothing worse than missing out on a ripe opportunity for a sold-out show because you don’t book the venue in time. 

4. Sign the contracts! 

Touring contracts don’t have to be overly complicated — but you must stay professional, cover yourself, and make sure everyone is signed ahead of time. Booking contracts are often as simple as “an artist A, represented by the agent B, commits to play an N-minute show in the venue C on the day X for a $Y” — that will be enough to back up your words in case one of the parties has run-ins with the box office. 

5. Merch matters

Merch is an expectation for fans at your shows: if you don’t have the right stuff, or don’t have enough sizes for your tees and hoodies, then fans will leave disappointed. It’s less money in your pocket, less happy fans, and it can all be easily avoided with a little preparation! 

Remember: unsold merch doesn’t go in the trash; it just gets sold afterward online. Better to have merch on hand for every fan who wants it than to risk running out early. Make sure to bring your music too: band t-shirts and hoodies are cool and all, but you want to give people a way to buy and share your music as well! Bring along some vinyl or even CDs. 

And finally, accept as many payment methods as possible. The fewer payment options you take, the more you are limiting yourself and preventing people from buying your merch. When it comes to people giving you money, there’s no reason to discriminate: take credit card, Venmo, Square, Paypal, and any other commonly used payment method.

Conclusion 

Touring is one of the most exciting parts of being a musician, but the behind-the-scenes mechanics of making a tour work are tricky (to say the least). Many artists experience massive burnout dealing with the logistics of touring than playing the shows (that’s the fun part). Just remember to take it one step at a time: first the big-picture stuff like figuring out where to tour and which are your most important shows, then the nitty-gritty details of booking venues, planning routes, signing contracts, and so on.