Tour manager or road manager: Manages travel arrangements, pays bills and handles problems as they occur while the band is touring.You'll need a production manager and tour crew to take care of the logistics andВ set-up the equipment on the road. With schedule set and contract in hand, you're ready to get on the road again. Make your requests regarding the schedule, but in the words of Mick Jagger, 'You can't always get what you want.' Concert promoters are in business to make money, after all, and they want to keep a band working, not taking days off. And if the tour turns out to be really successful, it may even be extended with additional concerts. If not enough tickets are sold, one or more of the concert venues may drop out and be replaced with a concert in some other location. While the beginning of the tour may be thoroughly mapped out, the rest is likely to be more loosely scheduled. You'll also want to be open to schedule changes. There may be even more demands on band members' time. A promoter or record label is likely to want the band to also do local promotions and interviews with media, meet with fans and sign autographs. Keep in mind, too, that concert tours involve a lot more than setting up, rehearsing and playing for an audience. Days off are worked into the schedule to give the band and crew time to recuperate after a number of hard days of concerts and travel.Enough travel time is built in, allowing for traffic and weather conditions, so that the band has time to set up and do any necessary rehearsing before a concert.The tour venues follow a geographically logical way instead of resembling a criss-cross, connect-the-dot pattern of overlapping routes.Here are some details covered in a rider: While the contract itself is usually short, covering payment, profit splits, dates and locations, the rider may be 10 pages or more. Riders can be attached to handle specific tour details. The standard contract is the American Federation of Musicians' AFM Performance Agreement. If a promoter offers your band work through your manager, the next step is hammering out a contract covering the tour. Once you've found possible promoters, have your manager or agent contact them with information about your band, including genre, background, previous club and tour experience and a CD of your music.

Check with venues where you'd like to play to see which promoters work with them.

Pollstar also sells industry directories listing information for booking agencies, concert venues and concert support services.

Check industry publications like Billboard and Pollstar, the concert industry trade publication, for ads and articles.

Word-of-mouth references may lead you to a promoter. If you've decided you're ready to tour, the next step is preliminary planning, probably led by your band's manager. Gerald Casale, a founding member of Devo, recalls that band members only earned $12,000 each from the new wave group's Freedom of Choice tour, which grossed $2 million during the group's heyday in 1980 - and the take would have been even less if T-shirts hadn't sold well. Limited profitability is nothing new for touring bands. That's not even considering sliding CD sales and the move to digital music. By the time the venue, concert promoter and ticket vendor take their cuts, equipment rentals and crew are paid, and transportation and living costs are covered, there may not be as much for the band as you'd expect. Miley Cyrus and the Rolling Stones aside, if you expect to make a lot of money off concert tours, you're likely to be disappointed.

What do we want out of a tour - greater exposure for the band, bigger paychecks for the band members or something else?.

Can we get along well enough with each other to survive a tour together?.Are we getting enough club bookings and a strong enough response from fans to indicate that they will buy tickets to our concerts?.Do we have a reason to tour now - like a new CD to promote? Do we have copies of CDs to sell if we are on tour?.Can we handle the rigors of travel and the challenge of playing that material every night as if it's fresh and new?.Do we have enough material ready to perform on a tour?.

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