The whiskey-swilling, pony-tailed image of the rock ‘n' roll road manager was never all that accurate, though it became a widely familiar trope thanks to films like This Is Spinal Tap and Roadie. But try to imagine Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the role instead of Meatloaf. That's one more outcome of the confluence of live music having become the core earnings engine for music and the ever-increasing use of Internet-based services, social and otherwise, to get out and stay out on tour.
TourSavant.com's Virtual Road Manager won't get you laid (except, perhaps, by very geeky girls), but it does a lot of the other grunt work for tour managers and sound systems managers. Through the Web site, which launched last December, touring musicians can geographically map out tours, using a Google Maps-fired application. The site's clever Venues button brings up a database of clubs state-by-state, some of which are links to info like venue size, seating and so on listed first, and they're filterable by genre. (You can find out quickly where all the death-metal clubs in your state are.)
Underscoring its social-networking roots, TourSavant.com links to all the major online communities and offers a free service that sends a text message to bands within a four-hour driving radius of a venue that's available in the next 24 hours (an information-overload proposition if the band's genre doesn't match the club's). But the site can also reach beyond the MySpace camp to offer 24/7 live support to answer touring-related questions and a branded MasterCard debit card that provides fuel and lodging discounts.
TourSavant.com is the latest of what might become a collection of online touring community-based propositions, the live-sound iterations of the MySpace-like recorded music sites. Bandize.com, which went live a year earlier, offers a more holistic approach that includes accounting software and a database that lists assets by type and serial number. But its live touring applications include tracking of tour dates, venues, hotel accommodations and itineraries. Members of a tour – including mixers and techs – get their own logins for a band or tour's account, with the ability to assign tasks and monitor productivity. An inventory-management tool keeps track of every T-shirt or CD that is sold or given away, registering the cost of the swag or the profit from the sale. And, of course, Bandize.com syncs with the usual social networking suspects.
Another entry in the software tour management category is atourbook.com, which developer Grant Garner says offers a high level of security to users, with password-protected access via Internet or mobile phones. A new version of the service due later this year will offer cloud-based data storage using a secure server. "All the information needed for touring now, from venue info to itinerary to individual crew member info, is dynamic, constantly changing," says Garner, who spent 16 years as a tour manager for artists including Carolyn Dawn Johnson and Alan Jackson, and who came off the road last year to devote more time to his software enterprise. "You can't keep up unless you have information distribution that's just as dynamic."
As social as some of these Web site services might be, they are not free. Bandize.com costs $15 per month, and a principal at the company estimates that Bandize.com had about 1,500 users through its alpha and beta test runs, which ended in December. TourSavant.com's basic membership costs $12.50 per month and the PRO Level 24/7 concierge tier is an additional $89 per month, which would put a year's membership at over $1,200. Atourbook.com's most expensive subscription tier will cost $200 per month, which, Granger says, it was costing to do analog tour books for the artists he worked with.
Is it worth it? More importantly, to what extent can touring music be managed effectively via the Internet?
"This does for touring musicians what access to cheap, powerful recording technology did for record making," comments Andy Miles, one of three partners behind Bandize.com. "It gives them the power to run their own tours more effectively. It's why we made the ‘show' and ‘tour' sections of the Web site prominent. It's where music makes most of its money today."
The analogies to social networking may be misleading, though. MySpace, once touted as the new paradigm for the music business, is limping along; more focused online professional propositions such as eSession.com have not gained any real traction. If the emphasis were to be shifted to enterprise-type solutions, like some kind of scaled SAP software, it begins to make more sense. I'd rather see QuickBooks integrated into touring software than Facebook.
Without question, there will be more software solutions in the future for touring. We're simply at the stage where we can watch them as they develop.
