Live events and tours are finally coming back, which is making for a busier-than-ever tour season as artists look to make up for lost time. However, challenges and obstacles continue to impact the entire live entertainment industry, including staffing shortages, limited venue availability, increased costs, and travel uncertainties.
“The good news is that there are tons of tours, and people are seeing a lot more shows than they were pre-Covid, at least for now,” Paul Bradley, CEO and co-founder of tour management software company Master Tour, tells XLIVE. “That's great, but there's a lot of companies out there still struggling to meet this rush of demand while catching up from the wrath of Covid.”
Many tours are operating with reduced crews who are wearing multiple hats to make up for their smaller numbers. Lack of resources is another challenge: “One thing you hear every day now,” says Bradley, “is ‘who’s got an extra tour bus?’ and there just aren't enough to house the amount of tours that are going out.”
Since the lifting of Covid restrictions on gatherings and events, Bradley shares that Master Tour’s subscriber base has jumped much higher than pre-pandemic levels, due in large part to the sheer number of tours that are either happening or in the planning phase right now — there are already tours being planned in Master Tour for the end of 2023 and early 2024. In addition, many new entities are finding the software that hadn’t been using it in the past, including theatrical productions and touring ballet companies.
As happy as everyone is to be back in business, Bradley shares the mindset of many other industry professionals that the current state of affairs is only temporary. “I don't think the capacity that touring is at right now is sustainable,” he says. “I think we'll see a correction in a year, and I think the whole industry is expecting that, because everything just seems to be double and triple booked to make up for lost time.”
During the pandemic-era pause on live events, Bradley and the Master Tour team made the conscious decision to not make too many updates to their Master Tour software and made sure to keep clients’ tour data intact for when they returned. “We didn't want people to return to Master Tour and have it be this totally new software. We knew when touring resumed, they would want to come back and see it just as they left it,” he notes.
However, Master Tour took the opportunity during the pandemic to add several helpful features that didn’t impact the overall functionality of the software. One was an integration with FlightAware, which is particularly useful given the headaches of post-pandemic travel interruptions and delays. Tour managers can simply input travelers’ flight numbers and view fight information from FlightAware, updated in real time, from the Master Tour flight dashboard.
Looking forward to next year, Bradley shares two other exciting features that will be coming to the platform to further support venues, tour managers, and the tour planning process. The first is a service that will enable venues to interact with tours and help standardize the venue tech package so that tour managers aren’t receiving a different tech package format for every venue they book. This will also enable tours to store and search tech packs in a central location and improve efficiency.
Also coming soon is a job search functionality that Bradley describes as a bit of mix between LinkedIn and Yelp for the touring community. Master Tour plans to leverage its network of over 250,000 users to create a platform for them to post and search for jobs within the industry, as well as find resources about amenities and activities in various touring destinations.
The live entertainment industry still has some challenges ahead, especially with the high turnover of talent that the industry experienced during the pandemic and the influx of new people who are still learning the ropes, but Bradley remains optimistic. “I'm super confident in the overall health of the business,” he says. “The core group of people that I grew up in the business with — the main companies and vendors — are still around, so I think we're in a really good position for the foreseeable future. I’m very much looking forward to it.”