Forty acts, four stages, one inbox
The festival has forty-odd acts across four stages. For each one, the advancing team needs the technical rider, stage plot, input list, backline needs, hospitality rider, dressing room requirements, guest list, vehicle details, arrival and departure times and the set time. Agents send the contract. Tour managers send riders that are a year old. Some send a PDF, some a link, some a photo of a handwritten plot.
Two weeks out, a headliner's tour manager emails a new rider with extra backline that nobody budgeted for. The stage manager on the second stage is still working from an input list for a different lineup of the same band. Artist liaison has three versions of the hospitality rider for one act.
Why advancing is a mess of versions
Every act sends its standard paperwork, which was written for a tour, not for your festival. The work is in reconciling that with what you agreed and what each stage can provide.
- Riders and specs arrive in many formats and many versions.
- The contract and what the rider asks for do not always match.
- Each department (stage, backline, catering, artist liaison, transport, accreditation) needs a different part.
- Changes from tour managers arrive late and by email, to whoever they last spoke to.
- There is no single view of what is agreed, outstanding or changed for each act.
What loose advancing costs on show day
A band arrives expecting backline that is not there, or with more inputs than the stage was set for. Changeovers overrun and push every act after them later on that stage. Hospitality riders are over-delivered because nobody checked them against the contract, or under-delivered and the artist is unhappy. For a festival, overruns can also press against licence conditions on finish times, which is a serious matter for the organiser.
The advancing team pays for it in hours. Reading every rider line by line, comparing it with the contract and forwarding the relevant pages to five departments is slow, repetitive work that happens in the busiest month of the festival year, and the team member who holds each act's thread becomes a single point of failure if they are ill.
One advancing record per act
- Each act has a record created from the contract: set time, stage, what is included and what the festival provides.
- The tour manager gets a link to an advancing form: tech contact, input list, stage plot upload, backline, hospitality, guest list, vehicles, arrival times.
- Uploaded riders and plots are read and summarised for the team, with differences from the contract or from the stage's standard specification flagged.
- Each department sees its own part: stage managers get input lists and plots, backline gets the list of kit, artist liaison gets hospitality and dressing rooms, transport gets arrival times.
- Late changes from the tour manager are made through the same link, and the departments affected are alerted with what changed.
- Guest lists feed straight into accreditation within the act's allocation.
- Day sheets per stage and per act are generated from the records and kept current on phones.
| Item | Collected from | Checked against | Sent to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input list and stage plot | Tour manager | Stage specification | Stage manager |
| Backline request | Tour manager | Contract and shared backline | Backline supplier |
| Hospitality rider | Tour manager | Contract | Artist liaison, catering |
| Guest list | Tour manager | Act allocation | Accreditation |
A festival advance that stays current
Advancing starts with a link to every act. The advancing team spends its time on the flagged differences, such as a rider asking for backline not in the contract, rather than on reading every PDF. The second stage's manager sees the right input list because the old one was replaced, not added to. When the headliner's rider changes, the backline supplier and artist liaison each get an alert. On the day, each stage has a current day sheet on its tablet.
Is your advancing like this?
- Advancing lives in email threads with tour managers.
- Stage managers have worked from an old input list.
- Riders are not checked against contracts until show day.
- Guest lists are typed into accreditation by hand.
- Changeovers overrun because of unexpected technical needs.