This “site visit” will be a conversation with Joe Carsello, Senior Talent Buyer at the Metro in Chicago, an 1,100 capacity general admission rock club. We will pull together all the bits and pieces we’ve learned about in previous workshops to see how they interact in the real world. The story starts with the venue’s history and journey to one becoming one of the country’s premiere and iconic venues. We’ll then look at the programming mission, production capabilities, and the flow of a typical show day. Along the way we’ll touch on sponsorships, marketing, ticketing, show expenses and much more. A conversation about the Metro wouldn’t be complete without an overview of internationally renowned SmartBar, and a look at the struggles of live music venues during the pandemic.

You can’t sell the tickets if the fans don’t know about the show. This workshop will dive into how to get the message out effectively in a rapidly changing digital environment. Jen is joined by two Directors of Marketing, Steph Mirsky and Kyla Lombardo, to look at the big picture of marketing right now, how data drives decisions, and how to keep a message alive when there’s a pandemic that has slammed the brakes on the entire live event industry.

Merchandise is one of the primary revenue sources for touring artists. This workshop will dive into the deal structure between artist and merch company, best practices to maximize revenue and profit, and look at innovations in the industry.

Jen developed a number of methods to efficiently handle large volumes of information during her 9 years tour accounting the Vans Warped Tour. We’ll look at Jen’s Warped Tour settlement sheet, settlement advance, bus driver processes, and more. Additionally, we’ll take a look at a detailed tour budget format and other useful tour accounting tools. This workshop is your chance to ASK JEN ANYTHING about tour accounting, the concert industry, careers, work/life balance as a roadie, etc.

Artists alway ask, “What’s a manager looking for in a new band?”, “How can I get an agent to notice us?”, and “What makes a promoter want to book us?”.

Jeremy Weiss, Jeremy Holgersen and Randy Nichols will join Jen to answer those pressing questions and more. Click for more info and to sign up to appear live.

A rider is more than a list of food demands such as only green M&Ms. It’s the written document that specifies every detail a local promoter needs to know to get an artist’s show on stage. Advancing is the process of working through those details prior to the show day. Jen and Jim Digby, Director of Touring for Linkin Park, will dig into this topic with tangible takeaways for all levels of touring. Click for more info.

Tour Managers Lisa Brownlee & David '5-1' Norman join Jen to dole out advice to the young guns. It should be a good production office hang! Click for more info on how to sign up to appear.

Jen will outline the typical qualities and characteristics of the most common venue types. Click for more info.

Black Lives Matter. We will not be holding a workshop today in observance of Music Industry Black Out Tuesday. Click for suggestions on how to fight the systemic injustices and enact change. 

Jen and a Mike Yanoscik, Tour Accountant at Gelfand Rennert & Feldman, LLp will walk through creating a tour budget for a theatre / arena level tour.

Tour Manager Frank Fanelli will join Jen in creating a tour budget for a club level tour.

This workshop will take a look at show expenses. We’ll walk through each line item and discuss where the numbers come from and how to budget for them.

This workshop will take a look at some of Jen’s favorite spreadsheet tips and tricks. We’ll look at a variety of spreadsheets created for different purposes, and build a basic settlement spreadsheet live.

After the base knowledge gleamed in Part 1, Jim Digby, Dave Shapiro and Adam Weiser will join us for a discussion about routing.

This workshop will take a look at the considerations that go into routing a tour. We’ll create a first draft of a routing. “Homework” will be creating a routing within certain parameters.

This workshop will focus on the Promoter Profit and Versus deals. We’ll look at the situations each deal is used in and work through the calculations. Be prepared with paper, pen, and calculator - we’re calculculating these deals by hand.

Before we can get into the details of the upcoming topics, we need a broad overview to get us started on our Concert Business Journey. This workshop will be a lecture-style story of how a tour gets on the road. This foundation is key to understanding where all the different parts fit together. There will be time for questions at the end.