What You Need to Know About Music Venue Profitability

After the year and a half we’ve had, it’s a relief to be able to host live music events again. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, venue owners across the country were under immense pressure to stay afloat when revenues were next to nothing while fixed costs still needed to be paid. Though music concerts and other live events are back, it’s not the same. With social distancing requirements in place and the constant need for professional disinfecting services, profit margins are thinner than ever and music venue profitability is a concern.

Venue owners like yourself need to make decisions during the booking process to gauge profitability, but without the right data, you’re just winging it and hoping to make money at the end of the night.

As we enter the new normal and get back on track, it may be time to reinvent your venue’s event management system. The best way to do that is to employ the right event management software that aligns with your business model and goals.

How Does Event Management Software Affect Music Venue Profitability?

You’re probably thinking, “Wait a minute—we just agreed that our profit margins are thin enough. And now you’re telling us that we need to spend money to revamp our system?”

That’s fair. And we understand how every penny counts, especially right now. But hear us out.

There’s no wiggle room for mistakes. Everything has to be accurate, on the books, and laid out perfectly. If your current system is an intern entering data into a spreadsheet off of a haphazard pile of sticky notes, there’s a chance that a number will be mistyped or a sticky note will get lost. If your current system is digitized and disjointed, then there’s likely to be discrepancies or redundancies across the different platforms you’re using.

Investing in an elite software integrates everything from the offer to settlement. You can secure dates with an artist anytime, anywhere. You can find a document within seconds instead of rifling through an endless stack of folders. You can have all of your numbers automatically tallied and calculated, so you have a clear picture of an event’s revenue. And as all these functions directly impact the music venue profitability, ignoring them may end up being a costly decision that you may not be able to afford in the long run.

That said, many event management platforms on the market are generalized or made for users in other industries. If you are going to invest in software, choose one specifically made for handling live music events.

Related: Can Music Business Software Save Your Venue?

Stop Taking Shots in the Dark

The only way to protect live music venues is to make enough to keep the doors open. The government passed the Save Our Stages Act amid the mass venue closures due to COVID, but those funds have only gone so far, that is, if you were lucky enough to receive them. Outside of a slight boost to keep the lights on, the government can’t help you maintain your music venue profitability.

Even if you don’t want to install entirely new software, using a concert cost calculator can help you better understand how to increase your profits for an event.

A concert cost calculator is exactly what it sounds like: a tool to quickly generate numbers for potential gross profit and the number of tickets you need to sell to break even. On one side, you’ll enter the number of seats in your venue and the average price of a ticket. On the other side, you’ll identify the expenses you’ll likely incur from the artist, production, marketing, and more.

This tool offers a great way to get started, and if you’re trying to stick to a tight budget, it can help you understand where your focus needs to be leading up to a given event.

However, the more events you’re hosting, the more often you’ll have to revisit the cost calculator. Also, tracking expenses for each event will become complicated if not done right. The right event management platform will help you increase your music venue profitability by automatically generating the cost estimates for each event and helping you track them in your system.

Give Yourself a Break

You’ve been working tirelessly to keep the lights on and scrape together some semblance of music venue profitability. While there’s likely no way you can take a vacation, you can make life easier for yourself and your team.

Adopting software tailored to music venues helps you be more productive with fewer resources. You’ll be able to keep track of everything in one central location, draft and distribute documents in minutes, execute payouts with the click of a button, and keep tabs on expenses and revenue in real-time.

And if you or anyone on your team needs to take that work-related trip, cloud-based software will let you stay on top of what’s going on in the office from anywhere.

Related: Venue Management Software: Why You Need it NOW

Hope for the Future

Although things were pretty bleak there for a while, we’re bouncing back and can see the neon light from the venue bar. As ready as you are to have people packing the house again, artists are just as ready to perform, and the fans are just as ready to scream-sing along.

As Americans get more spending money in their pockets and the economy swings up again, you’ll see a boost in your music venue profitability. And it may be even sooner than you think. Nearly 60% of American concert lovers stated that they’d be willing to see a live event again once they were fully vaccinated. And now that more people are vaccinated, you can safely get people in the house.

The demand is there; you just have to be prepared to deal with the demand without getting in over your head. Hey, we get it. Planning events after nearly two years of no events? It’s hard not to get carried away in the spirit of rock-and-roll. But as a venue owner, you are still operating a business, and you have to keep an eye on those thin margins.

That’s another reason you should consider adopting event management software: it will help you surf the wave of the resurgence of live events. Everybody wants the easiest possible solution, and if you can make the process easy for your clients, they’re going to want to book your venue over and over and over again.

You don’t even have to give up the systems you already know and love. The best platforms will simply integrate those systems so the software can generate totals and update event information in real-time.

Prism for Music Venue Profitability

Prism has everything you need to revolutionize the back end of your venue management. Our software is easy to use, install, and integrate into your current system. We make income and expenses transparent and easy to track, so you can keep doing what you love while increasing your music venue profitability. You’ll wonder how you ever managed your venue without Prism in the first place. Get started today.