Artist Growth Signs Bank, Travel Partners; App Goes On The Road With Aldean, Luke Combs

Susan Urmy) – Matt Urmy
Artist Growth

Cloud-based live touring app Artist Growth continues to aggressively expand, announcing a financing deal with Pinnacle Financial Partners as well as a booking and scheduling partnership with travel agency Rising Star Travel.

Starting in 2012 as a tool for tour managers, Artist Growth has become a powerful platform used by major artist management companies like Red Light, C3 Management and Vector, and was adopted by the teams of of Jason Aldean and Luke Combs to assist in everything from accounting to scheduling to settling shows at the end of the night. 

A tour-financing program is the first offering from Artist Growth’s strategic partnership with Nashville-based Pinnacle Financial Partners, as reported by Pollstar in May. It’s designed to benefit artists at every career level, and allows agencies to upload event routing and confirmed guarantees into the Artist Growth platform. 

Pinnacle then approves an advance, “ranging from thousands of dollars into the millions based on tour dates, guarantees, insurance terms and more” according to the announcement.  

 “The key to striking the partnership with Pinnacle was being able to show them how much financial activity was being tracked in our system,” Artist Growth leader and chief strategy officer Matt Urmy told Pollstar. “We never release client data, ever, and our database is totally encrypted. But when we look at things in the aggregate we found some pretty staggering numbers. I can not be more pumped to be able to start moving into the areas of not only giving artists the tools to manage their tours and their business but to capitalize their business.” 

The lending program will remain in pilot through at least the third quarter, available only to a small number of invited users. Full access to Artist Growth clients is expected in the fourth quarter.

The company says Artist Growth now tracks more than $2.5 billion in tour revenue and nearly $700 million in expenses, with total event guarantees tracked around $1.7 billion.

The partnership with Rising Star Travel integrates Rising Star’s expertise directly into the Artist Growth platform, allowing tour managers, agents and managers to save time and streamline the logistics planning of a tour.

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Urmy has seen the program accelerate since its early days, when he envisioned Artist Growth mostly as a tool for smaller artist teams. 

“I decided based on what I had learned in launching our first product, the need was much greater than I had understood,” said Urmy, who has spent many hours on the road as a touring artist and saw the need for a program like Artist Growth first-hand. “The mission expanded to building a software platform that not only emerging and aspirational indie artists could use, but all of the companies and organizations and corporations inside the music industry that dealt in the live events space could also tap into and utilize in some way.”

C3 Management’s Chris Thomas, who counts Houndmouth among his clients, is a fan of the program.

“The financial aspect was on there in the beginning and that was one of the first things I started using,” Thomas said. “We didn’t have a business manager at the time in charge of all the accounts and finances, so It was really helpful. There was a merchandising component on there that’s really an added bonus.

 “What I like about is that it goes beyond touring – it’s about everything we’re doing. Whether it’s releasing music, or videos, any kind of promo we’re doing. Stuff that happens when the band isn’t even on tour,” he said. “If we’re shooting a music video I’m throwing in our logistical information, our travel information, it’s populating everyone’s calendars. You can even get alerts now, which is really great.”

Tour manager Jesse Aldulaimi who works with artists such as American Authors, is another to take the app on the road.

“Everything they said they were going to do in a short amount of time were things that a lot of people in my shoes had been asking others to do for a while,” Aldulaimi said. “Things like push notifications, so if I change a time for our soundcheck, it updates and lets everyone know that that’s been moved through the app rather than me having to do always go and make sure I text everyone with a last-minute thing. They’re making strides like that quickly and updating things every one to two weeks it seems, very beneficial updates. I’ve really enjoyed that.”

The app also helps when it’s time to get down to business.

“If you’re sitting down with a promoter and trying to reference a point on your deal – and a lot of times if you ran down to their office without your computer – it’s nice to just have that at your fingertips. I can go to the app and look at the financials. 

“I can just open that up and see this is how much were making tonight and the terms and conditions, it’s nice to have that on hand easily.”

For the Rising Star partnership, an artist’s team will be able to automatically generate schedules that can be shared across the entire team, with all travel booked through Rising Star syncing directly into Artist Growth. 

“These kinds of integrations are exactly what our industry needs,” CHIEF, manager and Owner of Big Loud / Maverick, said in a statement. “Anything that streamlines the flow of information for our teams adds tremendous value. Combine the power of this technology with the level of customer service we get, and it’s a no brainer.”