Best Laid Plans: Reconciling Touring Ambition With Reality (Production Live! Panel Recap)

Moderator
Misty Roberts | Tour Manager

Rebekah Foster | Owner & CEO, Ujima Sound Productions Ltd.
Meesha Kosciolek | Director of Production, Messina Touring Group
Lenore Kinder | SVP of Music, Wasserman Music
Randy Hutson | Senior Vice President, PRG Music Group
Pete Lopez | Automation Division Manager, SGPS Showrig

At this year’s Production Live! Conference, a discussion of the recent tariffs was one of the main topics of conversation. For the panel Best Laid Plans: Reconciling Touring Ambition With Reality, experienced professionals across all facets of a team putting together a tour noted that their jobs are about to get much harder with higher costs. The panel featured Misty Roberts moderating, with speakers Rebecca Foster, Meesha Kosciolek, Lenore Kinder, Randy Hutson and Pete Lopez.

The panel speakers all emphasized that, at the end of the day, the most important thing is to serve the artist’s vision on a live tour. However, with costs continuing to increase, budgeting for major tours can be a challenge. With the new tariffs, that’s sure to continue throughout the rest of the year. While social media and audience experience make touring an entirely different ballgame (with artists expected to post their shows on their own social media accounts and fans also posting the tour), and can sometimes make or break a tour’s ticket sales.

“The show itself is a reflection of the art,” Kinder, SVP of Music at Wasserman Music, said. “It’s not just the music anymore. There are certain artists I want to see with just a guitar, and you could hold a flashlight to their face and that’s all they need. But there’s other shows where [big production] elevates the entire experience. I think that artists are a lot more hands-on and involved with the way their show is going to be received by the audience. It’s content, it’s B stages. They’re also looking side to side with what their contemporaries are doing to deliver a show that’s as good or better than the next person. There’s always the new brass ring. It’s our job to deliver that to our clients because, at the end of the day, we serve them and they serve their fans. The level is much higher now… If a show doesn’t look right, that word’s going to spread and ticket sales are going to go down.”

Members of the team, such as Rebekah Foster, will go line by line explaining all of the costs: more production means more trucks, more people, more mouths to feed and hotel rooms to book. No longer are the days of holding a hotel block, as they require payment upfront. Conversations nailing down the final details of tours aren’t wrapped up until three to four weeks ahead of showtime, which also contributes to higher costs.

“There are a lot of factors with that, because artists are still promoting their record,” Foster said. “They have all these obligations to press, then social media and events. By the time approvals come, you’re four weeks out – then you find out how much food you need. Hotels are getting more expensive… I do find it’s becoming three weeks out and we’re now trying to make a budget work.”

When it comes to going over the budget itself, Foster has noticed that artists typically fall into two camps. One will stick by their vision no matter what, and agree to pay certain costs out of pocket to deliver the experience without compromise. The other will find places to cut, and they’ll work together to find the best way to do so while Foster still assures those on the road have all they practically need.

Meesha Kosciolek also noted the need to go over the practicality of different-sized rooms on a single tour. It’s not uncommon for artists to hit theaters, amphitheaters and arenas on a single run, meaning production must be scaled down or scaled up depending on the venue. While some artists want to focus on the production for the biggest rooms of the tour, bringing that along throughout the entire run, he notes that’s not practical. Instead, he suggests planning a production that works best for the majority of dates on the run and scaling up for the bigger dates.

Lopez has been designing grids for trucks to minimize how much space they take up, hopefully saving the crew from having to rent out more trucks while on tour (in turn saving them from having to hire more people on throughout a run). However, with new designs making gear heavier, the weight limits are now causing an impact where the number of trucks may not always be lowered.

For Hutson, one of the bigger problems he’s run into is high turnover with production managers. Coming out of the pandemic, those in the job are less experienced than the number who retired in 2020, and they don’t always have the knowledge to figure out the best way for the job to run smoothly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a time where we see production managers moving from tour to tour,” Hutson said. “There’s movement today. Two weeks or a day before a show, the production manager may change. We’re seeing that every day.”