Concerts Are a Risky Business: Why Leave Success to Chance?
The concert entertainment booking process, whether celebrity booking or less renowned artist booking should not be left to chance. Yet many venue talent booking agents focus on the wrong information when booking entertainment for their events. Instead of using data, they focus on things like music genre; whether they have heard of the artist; the artist’s performance fee, and artist’s availability as they go about booking entertainment.
What do these issues have to do with booking entertainment that will result in a financially successful concert? If fact, they only have a small impact on the actual financial success of the concert. By focusing on the wrong information for artist booking, the booking agent is rolling the dice and increasing the likelihood that the event will not achieve the goals set out for it.
The overall concert budget, along with an entertainment booking budget is where most booking agents begin the artist booking process. After all, you will need funds on hand to deal with payments required before any income is generated for the event. Advance deposits are required for venues, artists, and vendors, many as high as 50 percent of the quote or performance fees. Event marketing expenses will also be incurred before revenue is generated.
I routinely tell promoters and event organizers who approach TSE Entertainment about event management services, that they need a minimum of 60 percent of their overall budget in the bank before proceeding to host an event. Remember there are no guarantees that a concert will recoup expenses, let alone be highly profitable.
Why Not Increase the Chance of Success by Using Data When Booking Entertainment?
Unless the entertainment booking budget has enough funds for booking a celebrity with a huge number of fans, you will need to do a lot more homework before booking artists. In the digital era, analytics have become the backbone of success for booking agencies, artists, labels, and music marketers. Whether you do it yourself or your booking agency does it for you, the artist booking process needs to involve a lot of research. The data you need for booking entertainment is available from a number of industry sites that collect the data you need to make better concert booking decisions.
Just to recap, the financial success of a concert will depend on a host of factors. The subject of this article is a crucial one: Target Audience Data. When most promoters talk about target audience, they are addressing the people they want to buy tickets and attend their concert event. The question many fail to answer before booking entertainment is how well the entertainment aligns with that target audience. Oh sure, booking a country artist for a show in an area where country music is popular makes sense…or does it?
That’s where researching real data about the artists, their fans and their past box office is a critical part of the entertainment booking process. Having access to that data increases the chance that you will book the right artists for a financially successful concert. Fans of the artists will come out to your event. The question is how many and are they the audience you wanted? Check out this article for a more in-depth discussion of what I mean: Concert Production: Do You Pick Your Audience or Do They Pick You?
Any discussion about target audience must have the premise that the artists’ fans must align with your target market. That’s where you start. It doesn’t end there though. You also need to know such things as:
- How many fans do they have and how many are in the drawing area for your event?
- What are the demographic and psychographic characteristics of their fans?
- How do you reach them?
- What will people pay to see them?
- How many people turn out to their events?
- Does their reputation fit with your event’s Culture?
- Are they up-and-coming artists or on their way down in fan interest?
- Where is their music playing?
- Who is listening to their music?
- …?
Going back to my premise; if you had this information at your disposal, would you make better decisions when it comes to booking artists for your event? For the celebrity booking process, all this data is easily available. Not so with many less renown entertainers. But there is still a surprising amount of data that you can find if you take the time to do it or ask your booking agency to provide the data you need.
However, you should know that having access to all this data is not cheap. While some information can be gleaned from low cost sources, to have access to much of this information requires subscriptions to major industry databases. That’s another reason to use an artist booking agency like TSE Entertainment to understand target audiences TSE maintains subscriptions to many of the sites described below for its event marketing and sponsorship sales services, whereby most booking agencies would not invest in many of these tools.
Music Industry Data Sites and Applications to Consult When Booking Artists
The perspective of this article is research the artists you are considering for your event and to see if that band, artist, or celebrity booking will fill your venue or event at a ticket price that will be a big financial win. Remember that you will be either booking artists for a certain target audience that you already know how to market to and frequent you events, or will be marketing to fans of the artists you plan to book which you may or may not understand how to reach as a target audience.
Let’s start with the most common sites that a booking agency might use when doing entertainment booking.
Pollstar:
Pollstar covers the worldwide concert industry in a variety of ways. It’s a weekly trade publication, hosts a major industry conference, provides directories of different types of entertainment services companies, and hosts information on artist’s contacts for booking, management, record label, etc. It also provides the last 3-year listing of the average artist’s box office data that is reported to Pollstar by the venues in which they perform. If you want to see specific data on an artist for shows and box office information you will need to pay an additional $19.50 for such a report.
Here’s the rub on box office data. Pollstar and other box office data sites rely on venues to report the data for their events. Not all venues report their data, so the information is often incomplete. To access the data, you will need a subscription which is currently $648 for an annual subscription for the lowest price plan that provides access to what you want.
Celebrity Access:
Celebrity Access provides a database of approximately 200,000 performers. It contains information such as artist touring schedules, box office scores, performance fee ranges, responsible agents and managers – direct phone numbers and e-mail addresses, bios, and web site links, industry news. Its extensive listing of 14,000 venues with contacts which can be searched using a variety of filters can be very useful for promoters looking for the right venue for their event. Current monthly subscription fees are $119 per month for one user and $149 per month for a 3-user subscription.
While TSE has subscriptions to both, our agents find Pollstar their choice for box office information. Remember that if you are booking less renown artists, they most likely will not have box office information in these platforms.
Word of Caution: Take the artist’s performance fee provided in either Celebrity Access or Pollstar with a grain of salt. They are way out of date since these fees are continually changing. Using a booking agency, like TSE Entertainment, to do your entertainment booking is the best way to get accurate information.
Chartmetric:
Chartmetric has long been the leading platform for artist data. For anyone booking entertainment, Chartmetric has the potential to provide valuable information on specific artists you are considering booking for your event. It’s used by artist management agencies as well as those booking artists to make business decisions. It’s an all-in-one place platform to monitor chart performance, social media key performance indicators (KPIs), albums and audience demographics to streamline decision-making for the concert booking processes.
Providing market level data for 20 plus streaming and social media sites and analytics into artist fans location and demographics can be valuable in making decisions about the best artists to book for your event. If the artist you want is not available, you can search for similar (look-alike) artists that meet the same profile as well as look for potential up-and-coming artists by sorting or filtering playlists by using the A & R dashboard. Pricing ranges from $10 per month to follow one artist, to $60 per month for 10 artists, to $150 per month to access the full dataset of 11 million artists.
In 2025 there are a number Chartmetric alternatives out there geared to helping a booking agency find the right artists for their events. Like Charmetric, these analytics platforms can help you to book entertainment for events by providing the best artist candidates as well as analyze local relevance and promotional potential. The ones worth investigating for booking entertainment include:
Of these, Viberate Analytics is particularly appealing, especially with its Spring pricing promotion taking place now.
Let’s look at other platforms for gaining insights into fans that listen to or attend an artist’s performance
Placerai:
Placerai is an out of the box way to get insights into an artist’s fanbase. The foundation of Placerai’s platform is highly accurate foot traffic data which reveals where people go in the physical world. Placerai has data from 2017 and forward.
Placer’s Data Marketplace includes an extensive selection of demographic, psychographic, geosocial, and other datasets that can be seamlessly integrated with the foot traffic data to yield instant, actionable audience segmentation insights. Some of the many datasets available in Placer’s Marketplace include:
- Spatial.ai’s PersonaLive, which combines site visitation with digital behavior data to divide consumers into 80 different segments encompassing behavioral and demographic traits.
- AGS Behavior and Attitudes, which allows users to examine hundreds of psychographic profiles revealing consumers’ lifestyles and preferences.
- STI: Popstats, which offers comprehensive and accurate demographic data.
- Experian’s Mosaic, which segments audiences based on a combination of behavioral and demographic data.
How to Potentially Leverage Placerai Data with an Artist’s Fanbase
Placerai allows you to look at specific dates and times in the past for a space to see the foot traffic at that location. You can use this capability to research artists in the following way. Suppose Artist A headlined a concert a Venue X on a previous date? You could have Placerai analyze the foot traffic at that venue for the time the concert was taking place. It tells you how many people (90 percent confidence limit) were there during that time period. The potential data sets available as noted above allow you to segment those that were there in various ways. Because the platform shows where people came from before attending the event, you can also gain a great insight into the geographic drawing area of the artists as well.
The biggest drawback to using it this way is that there needs to be enough people who are being tracked to be at the concert for Placerai’s algorithms to work. It’s more likely to work for larger events, venues, artists who play multiple days, etc. that attract enough people for the platform to capture data.
Social Media Insights:
Each social media platform or streaming services has analytics that is extremely useful for booking entertainment. The issue for a booking agent or booking agency is that do not have access to those insights for any of the artists they are considering booking for their events. Those insights regarding who is listening or viewing social media is limited to the artist’s specific profile page. That means that you would need to get the insights you need directly from the artist’s management or booking agent.
Your booking agent should request that information when they request artist performance pricing and availability. Having that information in as much detail as management will provide is important in making booking decisions as to which artists would be right for your event.
Another Thing to Consider When Booking Entertainment
Don’t be blindsided by other issues that could impact your attendance if you book certain artists. When booking celebrities or artists for concerts, you should want the artists to also align with the culture of your event or venue. There is so much division in these times that it’s worth the effort to analyze sentiment and gain insights into opinions and trends regarding the artists you are considering for your event. You don’t want to book controversial entertainment unless it actually fits the culture for your event and intended audience.
Social Listening Platforms:
There are a number of options for social listening including Sprout Social, Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Keyhole, Meltwater and others out there. It’s beyond the subject of this article to go into detail about each.
Conclusion:
There are several ways you can get the fan data of artists to see if they are a good fit for you planned concert. In today’s digital world it’s an important part of the entertainment booking process. That data can mean the difference between having a highly successful event or of losing your shirt by booking the wrong artists for it.
The data provides what you need to book the right entertainment. What you do with it is another story. That’s because booking the best artist is only part of the process. Without using their fan data to execute a well thought out event marketing plan, you negate what you learned in the booking process.
This latter point is the reason it is dangerous for a booking agency to suggest a specific artist to headline a specific concert or festival. If the client doesn’t execute a well-funded event marketing strategy and the event fails to produce the attendance needed, who is going to be blamed? Not the client who failed to market the event, but the agency who suggested the entertainment. That’s why TSE Entertainment always gives the client the best information we have and let the client make the final decision as to who to book for their event. That could change if TSE is also handling the event marketing component or managing the whole event for the client.
Related Posts:
Understanding Your Target Audience Before Hiring Entertainment for Live Events
Booking Entertainers: Know Your Target Audience
