Report on the tour, not on the show
Twelve separate show reports hide the pattern that matters. What tour-level roll-up shows that per-date reporting cannot, and the one field you have to fill in for it to work.
Danny Angove
Co-founder, Backline · 30 June 2026 · 3 min read
In short
- A run of shows is one campaign with twelve outcomes. Reading it date by date hides which markets over-performed and when the announcement effect faded.
- Grouping needs an explicit tour name typed by a human. Inferring tours from dates and geography is fragile and produces confident nonsense.
- Combined sell-through against combined capacity is the honest headline. Total tickets sold across a run flatters shows in big rooms.
- The combined pacing curve exposes the peak and trough days across the run, which is where the on-sale and press effects actually show.
- Report the roll-up plus the two outliers. Nobody reads twelve tables and the outliers are where the decisions are.
A twelve-date run generates twelve sets of numbers, and most reporting stops there. The tour is the thing you planned, the thing you spent against and the thing you will do again, so it should also be the thing you measure.
What only shows up at the tour level
Which markets over-performed relative to the run. A single show at 71 percent tells you little. The same show at 71 percent when the run averaged 58 tells you a lot, and it is the input to whether that market gets a bigger room next time.
When the announcement effect faded. Aggregate the pacing curves across every date and you can see the shape of the campaign: the on-sale surge, how many days it lasted, whether the mid-run press push registered at all, and where the late run started.
Whether a run is front-loaded or back-loaded. A tour where the early dates sold and the later ones did not is a routing problem. A tour that paced evenly and finished strongly is a demand problem solved.
Revenue against capacity across the whole run, which is the number a promoter or agent will actually respond to.
The same run, per show and rolled up
IllustrativeThe one field that makes it possible
Grouping shows into a tour needs an explicit name on each show, typed by a person.
The tempting alternative is inference: cluster shows by date proximity and geography and call each cluster a tour. It is fragile in exactly the cases that matter. Two festival dates in the same fortnight are not a tour. A run with a three week gap in the middle is one tour, not two. A support run alongside your own headline dates gets merged into a single meaningless group.
So the field is manual, it is free text, and it is matched exactly. That is a deliberate choice: an exact string match on a name a human typed is predictable, and predictable beats clever for something a report is built on. Ours is a plain tour name field on the show record, set on the show form or once on a bulk import so it stamps a whole upload.
The cost is that somebody has to type it. The benefit is that the grouping is never wrong.
What a tour roll-up should contain
- Combined tickets sold and combined capacity, and sell-through as the ratio of those two.
- Combined gross, with the currency stated. Never blend currencies into one figure without saying what rate was used and when.
- Show count and date range.
- A combined cumulative pacing curve across the run.
- The peak and trough days on that curve, called out explicitly, because they are where the campaign effects sit.
- Per-show sell-through, ranked, so the outliers are visible without reading a table.
Asking for a tour roll-up
IllustrativeHow did the Nine Mile Tide spring run do overall, and which two dates are worth talking about?
Data readget_live_showsget_ticket_sales
Across the eight dates grouped under that tour name: 4,180 tickets sold against 7,200 capacity, so 58 percent combined sell-through, and 68,400 in gross across a five week range.
Best: Dublin at 91 percent of a 350 capacity room. It sold 62 percent of its tickets in the first four days, which is the strongest on-sale on the run by some distance.
Weakest: Nottingham at 33 percent. It never had an on-sale spike, which usually points at the announcement rather than the market.
The combined curve peaks on the on-sale weekend and again eleven days before the first date. There is no visible step around the mid-run press week.
Two dates have no capacity recorded, so they are excluded from the sell-through figure and included in the ticket total.
Illustrative example using a fictional project. The final line is the kind of exclusion that has to be stated, or the headline percentage quietly describes a different set of shows than the ticket count.
Reading the combined curve
The combined curve behaves differently from a single show's. Dates go on sale together and happen at different times, so the aggregate has a long tail of individual show run-ups layered on each other.
Two features are worth looking for.
The on-sale plateau. How many days did the announcement keep selling? A short plateau across a whole run suggests the announcement reached your committed audience and stopped, which is a marketing reach problem rather than a demand problem.
Mid-run bumps. Did the press push, the video, the support announcement produce a visible step? Frequently the honest answer is no, and that is worth knowing before you budget for the same thing next time.
Reporting it
Two pages. The first is the roll-up: combined sell-through, gross, show count, the curve. The second is the two outliers, best and worst, with a sentence each on why.
Nobody reads twelve tables. The roll-up answers "how did the tour do" and the outliers answer "what do we do differently", which is the entire content of the meeting that follows.
Feeding it back
Store the finished run. Market, capacity, final sell-through, curve shape, what was spent, what was announced and when.
After two tours you have a model of what your project's demand looks like in each market and how quickly announcements convert, which is worth considerably more for planning the third than any industry benchmark. Pollstar's year-end figures tell you what the top hundred tours in the world did. Your last two runs tell you what yours will do.
Common questions
- How should a tour be reported to a label or agent?
- Lead with the roll-up: combined tickets sold, combined capacity, sell-through as the ratio, combined gross with the currency stated, show count and date range, plus the combined pacing curve. Then show only the best and worst dates with one sentence each. Per-show tables get skimmed and the decisions live in the outliers.
- Should tours be grouped automatically by date and location?
- No. Inference breaks on exactly the cases that matter: festival dates in the same fortnight, runs with a long gap in the middle, and support dates alongside headline shows. A tour name typed by a person and matched exactly is predictable, and predictability is worth more than cleverness for something a report is built on.
- What does a combined pacing curve show that individual shows do not?
- How long the on-sale announcement kept selling across the whole run, and whether mid-campaign activity such as a press push or a support announcement produced any visible step. Frequently it did not, which is useful to know before budgeting for the same thing again.
Sources
- 1Pollstar, December 2025. 2025 Year End Business Analysis
- 2IFPI, 2026. Global Music Report 2026
Danny Angove
Co-founder, Backline
Danny Angove is a co-founder of Backline. He works on the music business side of the platform: what managers, labels and independent artists actually need to see, and which numbers are worth arguing about.
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