The band and crew of Walk the Moon stopped by this week for some Big Star tacos and an impromptu ping pong tournament, won in decisive fashion by the seasoned Eventric staffers.

Tour Managers Blake O'Brien of Walk the Moon and Stu Berk from Young the Giant sat down with Eventric's Paul Bradley and Brian Carpizo for a short video interview (which we will post next week.)


Walk The Moon with Eventric's Lauren Henney and John Lombardo.

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Check out Walk The Moon's appearance earlier this month on Last Call with Carson Daly:

Members of our staff (John Lombardo and Lauren Henney) designed some cards and t-shirts that arrived yesterday.  The t-shirts came out great and Eventric's Lauren Tolliver and the headless Lauren Henney modeled the two shirts.

For a limited time, we're shipping out free t-shirts if you tweet or FB us.  We're also giving them out to all the people we meet out in Chicago or wherever we are.

Eventric Master Tour users Young the Giant were recently interviewed on the popular tech blog Mashable for their Music Monday series.  The topic was "Young the Giant's 6 Essential Apps for Bands on Tour" and they had this to say about Master Tour:

3). Master Tour: Guitarist Eric Cannata suggests that fellow musicians check out tour management tool and mobile app [iTunes link] Master Tour if they want to stay on track while on the road. “It gets you out of a pickle,” Tilley interjects.

 

We always get feedback from the power users (tour/production managers etc.) so it is nice to hear when artists notice that things run more smoothly when using Master Tour.

 

Here's a live version of their song "My Body" - enjoy.

 

 

We knew that "Weird Al" Yankovic was a user of Master Tour but were not aware until last weekend that he picked it as his favorite app on a national public radio program last week!  In fact, Master Tour was the subject of an interview with the legendary pop culture music satirist on the American Public Media program "Marketplace" - a program with over 8 million listeners on a weekly basis.

As expected, "Weird Al" was both effusive and funny in his praise of Master Tour but I think he may have jumped the gun a bit when claiming that a "dead hooker" and "groupie" feature was on the way in the next update.  (Maybe not this next one but you never know...)

 You can listen to the full interview going to the Marketplace show site here or just click the play button below.  Written excerpts from the show are below.  Great stuff and thanks to "Weird Al" Yankovic and American Public Media's John Moe for a nice interview.  (And click here to see when the "Weird Al" tour will be near your town.)

 

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JOHN: Weird Al Yankovic is with us and Al you travel the world, you have a mobile phone, what app has made a difference in your life?

AL YANKOVIC: Well I have to say the app that has been the most critical to my career has been a app...which I like to call because that's the name of it - Master Tour Mobile.

JOHN: Oh.

AL Y: It's an app which the name would apply that would help you figure out what's going on on any given tour. I have to say that I don't use it a lot when I'm not on the road, but when I am on the road it's pretty indispensable because you know being on the road – what I like about being on the road is that it is brainless. I like that because when I'm home in LA I have to think all the time; being on the road you don't want to have to use your brain and that's why you're told.

JOHN: You do what you're told, right?

AL Y: You do what you're told. You're a puppet, you're a puppet on the road and Master Tour Mobile answers all your questions. Everything you need to know is on your iPhone. It's great because I'll wake-up and I'll roll over,  "Master Tour Mobile what city am I in? Scranton? Thank you Master Tour Mobile." It tells you everything. The tour manager will input all the information into it. I think there's a master program called Master Tour Desktop I think it's called, so the tour manager will put every little bit of information into that you know about the hotels, about the venue, about the city, and then as soon as he updates something everybody in the band, everybody in the crew will have that information on their iPhone so it's great. Because usually in the old days they would print out itineraries prior to a tour, which you know I think going to Master Tour Mobile we've saved seven or eight trees I think by now because we're not printing out all these itineraries.

JOHN: They used to be on parchment scrolls, right?

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"I have to say the app that has been the most critical to my career has been Master Tour Mobile."

"Weird Al" Yankovic

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AL Y: Yeah, [laughs] the Dead Sea Tour.

Eventric last week celebrated the holidays bowling at old-school Lincoln Square Lanes (awesome time) and it clearly feels like end-of-year mode - always a time for reflection. And what a year 2010 was for Eventric and the touring business.

Depending on who you talk to, 2010 was a terrific year or a horrible one. (Observation: at the Billboard Touring conference last month, nobody 'fessed up to having a bad year.)

On the down side, worldwide grosses are reportedly down between 15-25% from the year before. There was a seemingly increased number of cancelled or postponed tours. Ticket prices seemed to finally reach its zenith (which I wrote about in this post). Pigeon droppings prematurely ended a Kings of Leon show in St. Louis ("too unsanitary to continue" said the Twitter post.)

On the up side, things were very good for a lot of acts. If you are Lady Gaga, AC/DC, U2, James Taylor/Carole King, Justin Bieber - well let's just say that people are still paying top dollar to see the shows they love. The festival business continued to thrive this year. Worldwide box office grosses were over $3B. Country music continued it's consistent success. I've seen reports that the club business had a solid year.

We at Eventric enjoyed a very productive and successful 12 months. We released the all-new Master Tour late last year so 2010 was our first full year running our subscription-based software service. We welcomed several thousand new users over the year and released many new features including a very innovative settlement module, new mobile apps, document management, and custom tour book printing (with partner Access Pass & Design).

We worked with many tours of all sizes and genres - it continues to surprise me the number of working acts that we in the office have never heard of that sign up for Master Tour every month. We were a part of some of some really big tours (Rihanna, Dave Matthews Band, Black Eyed Peas), artists having breakout years (Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Zac Brown Band, MGMT, Owl City, Paramore, Lady Antebellum - see right), and some great new festival customers (Central Park Summerstage, Peats Ridge Festival in Australia).

Live Access (our permission-based VIP ticketing solution) processed millions of dollars of secure guest tickets for tours such as Bon Jovi, John Mayer, The Glee tour, and Pearl Jam.

I would like to thank all of our users for their support and business - our users are the greatest. As a guy whose worked in the software industry for many years I've never seen users as generous with their time and insight to give us feedback and help us continue to refine our products. Muchas gracias and you know who you are...

Looking Forward - 2011

What's next in 2011 for the touring biz? Our Eventric customers are gearing up and loading in lots of dates for next year. Dave Matthews Band is NOT touring for the first time in...ever. Backstreet Boys/NKOTB are going out for a "heritage" boy band super-bill. 30 Seconds to Mars and The Decemberists are going big out of the gate starting in early January. Judas Priest and [maybe] the Rolling Stones are going out for a "farewell" tour. (I went to The Who's first farewell tour in 1982 so forgive the quote marks.) From our perspective (and the activity on our servers), it looks like 2011 is off to a good start.

We have a large number of enhancements and new products scheduled for release in 2011, including our new artist management module (code-named Master Manage) and the first wave of Live Marketplace apps. (We brought in some new rockstar programming talent, see them at left during Eventric New Hire Orientation.)

I'll talk more about Master Manage in a future post but I can say that it will include things such as a multi-organization dashboard, a comprehensive budgeting and expense tracking feature, a marketing module, huge enhancements in the calendar and group productivity area, and a booking module. We have a large number of management organizations using Master Tour and this is the natural thing for us to tackle. Look for our first release of this module in April.

Last words: perhaps some of the "controversy" generated this year will lead to some better booking and pricing decisions as well as a renewed focus on improving the fan experience. We at Eventric will no doubt play a bigger part in 2011 by building the tools need to manage the huge flow of information that makes the show "go".

When I was a kid I remember listening to my sister's copy of Deep Purple Live in Japan. I'd sit in between the speakers as if they were a giant pair of mahogany headphones, imagining I was in the audience. The sound quality and the accompanying photographic work was superb, not to mention the packaging – double vinyl gatefold sleeve! 

The main thrust of live albums (up until fairly recently) was capturing someone else's moment, someone else's sound (that someone else, of course, being the band). For our rock heroes (Metallica, AC/DC, Prince, Led Zeppelin), the live album was the highlight of their careers – capturing not only a better, more adrenalized version of themselves and their songs, but also bottling a national (or sometimes worldwide) feeling. It also gave them a chance to illustrate their true intent perhaps more accurately than with they did on the album with the aid of a poorly chosen producer (Joy Division might be a good example of that).

It's not about the sound anymore....

Before I really delve into things, let me preface this. I'm not saying that the iconic live albums of the past are not still iconic for a variety of reasons. They are. Rather, the motivation of the fan to own the music has changed dramatically. Let's take a couple who met not on the night The Who recorded Live at Leeds, but two nights later at the Manchester show. For them, a shitty cassette that the now husband surreptitiously recorded on a Radio Shack portable with a crappy stereo mic is ten times more important TO THEM than the hi-fidelity version of the Leeds performance.

How do you explain to someone who just finished listening to Johnny Cash's Live At Folsom Prison album that you actually MUCH prefer a bootleg recording of him ordering large fries and a milk shake from a drive-through on Highway 5 two days later – because you were there!

12. Small is the new huge.

Always choose the smaller venue. The WORST thing that can happen is that the show SELLS OUT! Put a sign up, leave a crowd on the street prompting cries of, "who's playing there tonight?" Create the opportunity to place a great big SOLD OUT splash on your web page. No one (except us) will ever call to ask the capacity of the venue. Two hundred people in a room that holds 750 is a catastrophe. Put those same people in a 150 capacity bar and it's a riot! 

13. Make cool shit.

Make your work VIBRATE with your unique energy and your creative DNA. There are so many benefits to unique packaging: it makes you stand out from the competition, it's a great exercise for the band to think more clearly about what it is that you are (heavy, shiny, soft and furry, cuddly, nasty, rusty, etc), and that's how things get viral! Make sure that the answer to the question, "Do I want to open this package and check out what's inside?" is YES!

14. Use good tools and the Internet, find out where your fans are - and play there.

It's easier to deal with problems of equipment, staging, or no dressing room than it is to be well taken care of, but not have anyone buy a ticket. (We like Reverb Nation's Fan 360, Google Analytics, The Orchard's Heat map and YouTube Insight.) Pay for stuff that works for you – we are using Eventric at the office to help make sense of the insane amount of our events that are happening around the world.

15. Monetize the thing around the thing you used to sell.

Get over the boring concept of trying to sell music. BMW runs an ad campaign with the slogan, "We sell JOY!" Zappos is "delivering happiness." What is your band/brand selling? If your answer is nothing – then you just don't get it. And you won't get any. Create a need and fill it! Don't let a German car company beat your ass in the groovy-ness conceptual turn around Olympics. Think, create, accumulate, stimulate!

Eventric recently sat down with well known tour manager Thomas Reitz, who has worked with music industry luminaries such as Luciano Pavarotti, Madonna, Nelly Furtado, and Rihanna. Thomas talks about how he "accidently" started in the business while working as a photographer in his native Germany, his close relationship with Luciano Pavarotti up until his death, and some tips on being prepared as a big-time tour manager.

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EVENTRIC: How did you get into the business of managing tours? Give us an understanding of where you came from and how you got to be at this level.

THOMAS: Everything started as an accident. A friend of mine was a promoter and at that time I was in the German Air Force. He says, "Oh, you know a little English, can you help me to translate some of these riders. These events are getting bigger and I need somebody to help me to translate it." The promoter liked what I did and basically that's how I started to become part of the touring industry.

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"I did all the scheduling, stage, and organizing. It was an unbelievable time. If you work with one of the greatest stars in the world and then see how the others adored him - that was something even more unbelievable."

- Thomas Reitz on managing the "Pavoratti and Friends" tour

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EVENTRIC: What year was this?

THOMAS: That was 1978.

After the Air Force I opened up my own business as a photographer and moved to Munich. Some of the promoters I worked with were saying, "Now you have your own business, you know accounting and things like that," so suddenly I became an accountant and basically moved from production over to accounting and promoter rep.

Later on, one of these promoters needed me as a photographer for the first big show in Berlin with Luciano Pavarotti. I met Pavarotti and he ended up liking what I did with him. At that time his tour manager became sick and I helped out during a show in Munich. Two month later I'd been called to Zurich to again to help with another Pavarotti show even I had a previous booking from the same promoter to do the Genesis tour in Germany.

EVENTRIC: To do photography?

THOMAS: No, just as a tour rep. He said, "Don't worry about Genesis; I'll put somebody else on. I need you with Pavarotti because that's the big money right now." So I lost Genesis, Luciano's tour manager had to leave Zurich because he was really sick. He had a brain tumor and a couple of days later he died unfortunately.

A month later I got the tour plan, and for the next 6 years I did my photography business while I was Luciano's tour manager. And then we started with The Three Tenors in 1996, after the big success we had in Rome.

EVENTRIC: And that was huge.

THOMAS: And that became really huge. I was responsible for all 3 Tenors and the conductor and they all been already superstars I had to fly in to choose the right hotels, choose the right company for lights, sound, etc, make sure they had a private airport, because everything was private for them. Than after we did the Doger's Stadium show in 1996 which was the biggest worldwide transmitted show the management ask me to move to California to help them to prepare a world tour with the 3 Tenors.