What is a Tour Manager and what do they do?
As long as artists continue recording and releasing their music, there will always be live music performance and touring - locally, domestically, and internationally.
And with touring comes the need for one of the most important jobs in the live music industry - tour management.
This article will help you clarify who a tour manager is and what they do on a daily basis.
What is a Tour Manager?
Our definition of a tour manager is:
A non gender specific person who travels city to city with an artist, author, speaker, crew, or other VIP to manage their travel, income, expenses, touring personnel, media interactions, and to help facilitate anything else necessary to execute each show or event. (For the sake of this article, we’ll assume the tour manager is working with a musical artist to execute a live show)
At the most basic level, a tour manager is simply the person who handles or oversees almost every aspect of the lives and routines of musicians and bands while they are on tour. In other words, a tour manager ‘runs the show’ while the band is on the road.
Tour managers travel with the artist to ensure that the tour operates smoothly and punctually without unnecessary hiccups and problems. Tour managers typically work as independent contractors offering their services to different artists each year, but some have been known to stick with only one artist for the entirety of their career.
What are the Specific Jobs of a Tour Manager?
The tour manager handles both administrative and organizational duties, and to make sure everyone is satisfied, may even take care of the personal issues of other crew members or artists on tour.
The job of a tour manager can involve event coordination, accounting, travel and logistics coordination, operations, merchandise sales and ticketing settlement, human resources, and sometimes tour managers can even take on the role of a personal assistant. To be a good tour manager, one needs to be detail oriented, but also able to see the full vision of what the artist is trying to create.
Because a lot of the characteristics of tour manager transfer over to artist management, there are cases where the tour manager also doubles as the band manager. Often on smaller tours, the tour manager may be acting in a double role as not only a tour manager, but also a sound engineer, a driver, a merchandise manager, or other crew position.
Some specific responsibilities of a tour manager may include:
Creating a tour budget
Advancing and preparing all the details for each show
Securing and managing of all income and expenses during the tour
Overseeing other production elements like lighting, sound, publicity, and even selling of merchandise during the tour
Booking and coordinating all ground transportation, flights, hotels
Overseeing or directly handling the transportation of all VIPs and crew
Creating a security plan for each venue and public appearance
Working closely with publicists, show promoters, venue managers, ticketing agencies, etc.
Ability to solve extreme problems. Like unexpected issues that may arise during touring - (medical, security, travel, contractual)
Leading a team of varying size to execute each event
On larger or longer tours, the duties above may be shared between two or more people.
Completely outlining the specific duties of a tour manager can be near impossible as there are countless scenarios on the road that beg the tour manager's attention.
Ultimately, the job of the tour manager is to make sure that everyone, including the artist, is okay and happy while on the road. Tour management can be both fun and stressful, but can also be very rewarding as it is crucial to the success of an artist’s touring career.
In our How to be a Tour Manager online course we teach our students that though there are so many tasks a tour manager has to accomplish, there is one thing you must do first.
You have to take care of yourself before you take care of others. Just like on a plane when you put your mask on first before helping others - same concept. Your mental health is extremely important, and denying self care on the road is a recipe for a quick death to your career.
You can start our tour management course for free by clicking here.