The Importance of the Artist Advance Sheet for Events and Festivals.

Any event organiser managing a large-scale festival could face the challenge of managing in excess of 300 performance artists. How are these managed to ensure that artists turn up to the right venue and stage at the right time? The ‘Artist Advance Sheet’ has become an essential part of multiple artist management for any large event or festival.   

In the days before email the artist advance sheet was a hand written piece of paper, likely delivered to the artist by post, the information was static and any changes by either side would have to be made by a phone call or post. Thankfully the world has moved on since those days and the artist advance sheet is now sent electronically and amendments can easily be made the same day. There is, in many cases, still a reliance on spreadsheets and word documents to manage these and to some extent the process can still be quite manual.   

What is an artist advance sheet and what does it contain? 

The event organiser will work with their artist liaison manager to schedule artists based on a variety of factors including availability, transport logistics and genre for example. Once the negotiations are completed and the artist has confirmed all their details the event organiser will send through a confirmation of everything that has been agreed and both sides use these to plan their logistics. Typically, the artist advance sheet will include: 

• Date, time and location (venue and stage) of their performance.
• Times allocated for sounds checks.
• Dressing room schedules and rider information. 
• Artist’s fees agreed.
• Meal allowances.
• Number of artist and guest tickets allocated.
• Artist and crew member names and details. 
• Organiser's onsite contact details.
• Artist and crew’s vehicle details and parking arrangements.
• Travel and accommodation details including flights, hotels and transfers.  

The artist advance sheet may also have attachments including: 

• Technical, audio and lighting specifications.
• Stage layout specifications.
• Artist’s official press photo and bio. 

Whilst some of this information can be completed by the event organiser much of it needs to be completed by the artist to enable a final agreed version. Artist liaison managers often spend much of their time chasing artists for completion of the advance sheet. Once agreed there are often changes made so any process needs to make allowances for regular amendments.

Many event organisers will still use a manual system to manage their artist advance sheets and of course this takes up valuable time and effort. Thankfully many event and festival software systems now automate artist advance sheets with slick processes for completion and confirmation with automated notifications for missing data enabling changes to be made and confirmed in real time. 

Using an events software management platform like FestivalPro event organisers get all the functionality they need to manage their artist advance sheets. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The FestivalPro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features for managing every aspect of the artist advance sheet with a central place that contains all the relevant information and accessible by pre-approved personnel. All data on the advance is linked to other modules of the event management system and changes can be made in real time with notifications generated via email. 

Photo by Thibault Trillet from Pexels

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