Music Booking Agent Software: Managing Your Roster’s Calendar

Securing venues for the artists you represent is all about relationships. Ensuring that all the parties you work with are adequately taken care of is crucial to your success as a booking agent. But let’s be honest, without state-of-the-art music booking agent software, it can feel like a juggling act.

Most venues have a month’s worth of bookings, many with back-to-back shows. Managing your roster in real-time is difficult—people cancel at the last minute, there can be double bookings with other venues, tours need to change dates, or something comes flying out of left field.

Double bookings, unhappy talent, and not having shows booked that you thought were booked all lead to a damaged reputation and a loss of profit.

You need transparency and a single solution to stay organized and on top of any changes so you can adapt efficiently. That solution is event management software.

Why You Need Music Booking Agent Software

Working as a booking agent should be exciting, but with all the disconnected systems and tools you have to use to book an event, it often becomes more stressful than anything else. Relying on separate systems is inefficient, labor-intensive, and can lead to things falling through the cracks.

Music booking agent software integrates the various processes of your job into one place. Imagine being able to toss all of those sticky notes for a system you can take with you anywhere you go.

Related: The Best Event Management Software for Live Music

With state-of-the-art software, your team can collaborate more efficiently to manage your holds, offers, and settlements. And you never have to plug data into a spreadsheet ever again.

Will Any Event Management Software Work?

Theoretically, yes, any event management software will help you manage your roster’s calendar. But keep in mind that generalized event management platforms are built with a wedding, fundraiser, or corporate event planning in mind. And you aren’t like any of those event planners.

Because you work in the music industry, your requirements are different from those who work with different kinds of events. Thankfully, there are specialized programs built for managing live music events.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Specialized Music Booking Agent Software?

The primary benefit of adopting event management technology is to save time. Those who don’t take advantage of event planning software can waste up to 360 hours in a year completing menial tasks.

That’s 15 days’ worth of time and 45 eight-hour workdays. Think of all the things you can accomplish with those extra days by putting the software to work.

Some people are afraid that introducing music booking agent software means that they’re making their employees’ jobs obsolete. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth because the technology gives your employees the opportunity to do what they do best.

Besides, why would you want to do more work for less revenue?

What to Look For in a Music Booking Agent Software

When you’re shopping for software to help you manage your roster, you should pick a music booking solution that enables you to have everything you could possibly need in one place. Here are some of the features you should look for in your software.

Calendar Management

One of the most essential aspects of your job is keeping your calendar accurate and up to date. Managing your calendar should be as easy as humanly possible so you can quickly reference the information for an event.

Your team should be able to manage your calendar from anywhere. That way, if you’re at an important meeting with a client, you can check availability in real-time to prevent double bookings.

While whiteboard office calendars have their merits, a digital event calendar enables you to add dates and holds to a show with the click of a button. When someone makes an update, everyone’s calendar will get the update.

Using event management software also makes it easy to pull and share availabilities with venues and promoters rapidly. On top of that, the system should be able to generate various hold levels across potential dates automatically.

The best systems allow you to integrate your calendar with other industry-standard tools. For instance, as an event gets closer, your calendar could show you how many tickets have been sold for an event when you click on the event details.

Offer Generation

You probably didn’t get into the events industry because you love math. Having music booking agent software makes it possible for you to build custom offers while evaluating real-time break-even calculations. And the best part is that you don’t have to do the addition yourself.

The beauty of event management software is that you can set up templates for every kind of deal you could make for your artists. When it’s time to create an offer, your system will fill in the blanks for you.

With the right software, you can generate and send professional, branded offers in less than a minute. Even though the system creates the offer for you, you can make adjustments to compare deals and scenarios to make sure you’re getting the best possible outcome.

Additionally, you can estimate revenue, profit, and break-even instantly. The best systems give you the power to limit access to expense visibility while evaluating your internal budget.

Revenue and Expense Tracking

We’re back to math. Your event management platform should make it easy for you to track expenses, ticket sales, and internal revenue streams with the click of a button. And, no, not the button of your old calculator.

Your music booking software can help you generate detailed budgets that authorized team members can access at any time. With ticketing platform integration, you can see how many tickets have been purchased up to the second.

Instead of waiting until the end to put all of your expenses together, your software can send invoices and track actual expenses as they occur.

If you need to make adjustments or check up on an event’s progress, your platform should eliminate any guesswork. The best systems display break-even projections and net revenue calculations in an easy-to-analyze format.

Settlement

By the time you get to settlement, your platform should already have all your ducks in a row for you. With the right booking software, you can create a customized, branded settlement sheet with the click of a button.

Related: Concert Venue Settlement Best Practices

Additionally, your software should be powerful enough to give you separate internal and external settlement reports. These enable you to evaluate the success of an event internally and make strategic adjustments for future events.

At the same time, you’ll never overpay or underpay your artist or collaborators, which means everyone goes home happy, and you maintain a great relationship with everyone involved.

Collaboration and Communication

Especially if your team members are spread out because of remote work, collaborating with each other should be simple. With music booking agent software, you can invite everyone on your crew to work on your shows.

Rather than digging through your inbox to find a message about a particular event, your platform should enable you to easily access all communication between your teammates, show details, tasks, and deadlines.

Building Tour Offers

Your music booking agent software should alleviate some of the pressure associated with booking your artists’ tour dates.

The top-of-the-line systems make it simple to manage a tour or multi-night run by creating one deal for multiple shows. You’ll be able to see all the dates for a tour in one place so you can evaluate the tour as a whole or isolate specific events.

At the end of a run, your software can combine all the dates for a single venue in one settlement.

Finding the Best Music Booking Agent Software

If all of these features sound too good to be true, we’re with you. As events professionals ourselves, we kept asking why we couldn’t take care of everything in one easy-to-use system.

That’s why we built Prism. Prism has all of the features listed in this article and more. Stop wasting your precious time and energy and get back to the fun of live music events. Get started with Prism today.