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tourmanagement.com: Developed by touring professionals, designed by musicians

Roeland Veugelen lifts the lid on a platform developed by touring professionals and designed by musicians.

In a bid to prevent tour managers from frantically sifting through their inbox to find that one important email with guest list information, a promoter contact, or a parking plot, tourmanagement.com – a platform developed by touring professional, Roeland Veugelen and fine-tuned by over 200 bands and crews – allows tour managers to focus on what is really important when on the road: creating memories for concertgoers with the fewest headaches possible.

While touring with Belgian singer-songwriter Milow in 2008, Veugelen began developing an online tour calendar that could do the planning of individual band and crew members and centralise call sheet information. “My goal, from the beginning, was to replace the tour book – ‘the book of lies’ – with accurate and real time information distributed to an entire travel party, which is also available to access on their laptops and phones,” he explained. “Although I initially made it for myself, local promoters became interested in it.”

Based on the positive feedback of dozens of tour managers using the self-made software, Veugelen made the decision to develop a fully-fledged commercial iteration of tourmanagement.com in 2013. “We began to offer it as a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, so people could start using it.”  

The latest version of the software launches on 23 January. Prospective users can sign up to a free trial of the platform or explore subscriptions at: www.tourmanagement.com  

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATED IN OUR LIVE WEBINARS.

Welcome to Tour Management 101, a Youtube series that teaches basic and advanced level courses of managing concerts and live music events. Our show helped many music groups during the Covid-19 pandemic, and now we're here to help you. Subscribe to our channel to learn more!

Tour management 101 is a free online learning resource dedicated to teaching the next generation of the concert touring industry. Our weekly webinar series focuses both on the fundamentals of touring and the wide-ranging skill set required to be successful in the live event industry. Through group panels and one-on-one interviews with some of the most respected names in our industry, we are educating and growing a global network of students.

Hosted by a diverse group of experienced tour managers and featuring guests from across the touring spectrum, our shared goal is to strip away some of the mystery surrounding life on the road and make learning about the concert industry accessible and fun.

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The essential touring tool

For over 20 years, the top touring professionals in the world have battle-tested master tour to perfection..

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Tourmanagement 4+

Planning tool for bands, tourmanagement.com.

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Description.

Tourmanagement.com's mobile app gives everyone in your band, crew and management team instant access to the bands calendar and all callsheets. The app shows everyone the latest information about timings, guestlist, setlist, hotel and all other event related info. You can instantly put people on the guestlist or contact your fellow band/crew members directly from the app. All info is synced automatically when you are online, but remains available when you have no internet connection.

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Fixes an issue where some events with "no status" would not always appear in the event calendar.

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Taylor Swift shares big video hint the ‘Eras Tour' may be changing

“taylor swift, you have some explaining to do” wrote one fan., by amy eley | today • published april 25, 2024 • updated on april 25, 2024 at 9:10 pm.

Taylor Swift is taking fans behind the scenes of her “Eras Tour” with a series of clips, and Swifties now suspect there’s a hint as to changes coming to the world-renowned show.

Days after releasing her newest album,  “The Tortured Poets Department,”  Swift posted another YouTube Short video with her hit single “Fortnight,” featuring Post Malone,” playing over videos of her and her dancers rehearsing for the tour. But there’s one moment in the montage that has fans doing what they do best: speculating.

Fans will recognize many of the scenes being practiced, such as Swift's iconic entrance from the ground, her performance of "Lavender Haze" in a coat surrounded by clouds, playing "Champagne Problems" seated at a moss-covered piano and more. But one clip, in which Swift stands in the middle of a stage with her dancers lined up behind her wearing top hats and holding canes, did not appear in the original "Eras Tour."

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“Since when do background dancers have a top hat and canes?!” one fan with the username armaisacat.1989  captioned a TikTok  of the scene, adding “Taylor Swift you have some explaining to do!!”

The “Eras Tour” is a three-hour, 15-minute concert in which Swift performs songs from all of her albums since her 2006 self-titled debut record. Many — including the TODAY.com staff — have speculated whether or not the pop star would integrate “Tortured Poets Department” as another era in the show.

All will be (hopefully) be revealed when the tour begins again in Paris on May 9.

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This is the second YouTube Short Swift has posted since the latest album release. On April 19, she shared  glimpses of her personal life , again set to the tune of “Fortnight.”

In that compilation, her boyfriend, NFL star Travis Kelce, makes appearances with the star. The videos are in collaboration with YouTube, encouraging users to post their own “14 snippets” of their lives set to the same song.

This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY :

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Will Taylor Swift Add ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ To The Eras Tour? Here’s What We Know.

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Fans think Taylor Swift is dropping hints that she might be expanding her already 10-album-spanning “Eras Tour” setlist to include her latest release, “The Tortured Poets Department,” ahead of the tour’s upcoming European leg in May.

The Eras Tour returns in May for its European leg. (Photo by Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS ... [+] Rights Management)

Swift teased fans in a YouTube Short video Thursday night that it’s only a “fortnight until Paris”—a nod to both her return to the Eras Tour in Paris on May 9, and “Fortnight,” the lead single from “The Tortured Poets Department” featuring Post Malone.

In typical Swiftie fashion , fans quickly began decoding the video for possible clues about Swift’s upcoming shows, and some have pointed to what looks like a “TTPD” logo attached to a railing Swift leans on while singing, taking this as a hint that her new album could have its own “era” on tour.

Other Swifties noted the billionaire pop star can be seen wearing shoes strikingly similar to those she wears in the “Fortnight” music video, while some pointed out the hats and canes her backup dancers are using have not yet been seen at Eras Tour shows, a possible hint at new songs and choreography.

Swift fan accounts shared screenshots of an Instagram post from musical director David Cook who appeared to tease live performances of “The Tortured Poets Department” songs, though it has since been removed from his caption .

Swift’s collaborator on new song “Florida!!!,” Florence Welch, hinted at possibly joining Swift for an Eras Tour performance to British Vogue , stating: “If I was gonna do it, it would be a surprise.”

What We Don’t Know

What alterations Swift might make to the Eras Tour setlist to fit in “The Tortured Poets Department.” The tour has been noted for its length: Swift performs 45 songs over the course of more than three hours, leading fans to speculate whether she may need to make cuts to fit in her latest release. The Eras Tour has been billed as a celebration of Swift’s entire musical catalogue and each album, or “era,” has its own dedicated part of the setlist, with each ranging from one to seven songs. “Midnights,” her latest album release prior to “The Tortured Poets Department,” has closed out the setlist since the start of the tour and has had the longest setlist of any era.

Surprising Fact

The Eras Tour is already the highest-grossing tour of all time, but it’s only a little more than halfway over. Swift has performed 83 shows to date, but she still has 69 left, most of which are in Europe. She’ll be joined by Paramore as her European leg opening act, while Gracie Abrams will join her for her final North American leg . Swift will return to the United States, but only for three cities: She’ll perform in Miami for three shows in October, followed by an additional three shows each in New Orleans and Indianapolis. She will wrap up the North American leg, and the tour as a whole, with six shows in Toronto in November and three shows in Vancouver in December.

$1.04 billion. That’s how much the Eras Tour grossed across 60 shows between March 17 and Nov. 11, 2023, according to Pollstar estimates , making it the highest-grossing tour of all time.

“The Tortured Poets Department” dropped April 19 to record-shattering sales and streaming numbers. The 16-track album, and its 15-track counterpart subtitled “The Anthology” surprise-released last Friday, has already been streamed more than 1 billion times on Spotify as of Wednesday. That makes it the most-streamed album in one week in the streaming platform’s history. It previously earned the biggest single-day Spotify streams for an album with more than 300 million streams, shattering her own record with “ Midnights ” by more than 100 million. The album has sold more than 700,000 vinyl copies as of Tuesday, shattering her own record for the biggest vinyl sales week. Swift is on track to nab her biggest debut for an album on the Billboard charts yet: Billboard reported the album earned a massive 2.5 million album equivalent units in its first six days, consisting of 1.85 million in sales and the rest via streaming.

Further Reading

All The Records Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Has Broken (So Far) (Forbes)

Taylor Swift’s New Album Sends Fans On Lyrical Easter Egg Hunt—With Theories About Matty Healy, Joe Alwyn (Forbes)

Taylor Swift Sets All-Time Touring Record With $1 Billion Gross (Pollstar)

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Rippling’s Parker Conrad on the company’s new round, new SF lease and, also, its newest critic

Last week, TechCrunch broke the news that the workforce management software outfit Rippling was on the cusp of closing a new, $200 million round of funding at a hefty $13.4 billion valuation led by Coatue. We also reported that the round featured a separate, $670 million secondary component meant to give some of the company’s investors a bigger bite of the company, while letting Rippling’s employees — some of whom joined at the outset in 2016 — cash out some of their shares.

Rippling declined to comment at the time, but in an interview Friday afternoon, founder Parker Conrad confirmed our information, adding that the secondary component is actually a $590 million tender, with $200 million available for employees and $390 million available for seed and other investors. 

The round, Rippling’s Series F, is also almost entirely an inside round. Coatue is an earlier investor in Rippling, along with other backers in this round that have been investing all along, including Founders Fund and Greenoaks. The only new member on the cap table is Dragoneer, a growth-stage investment firm in San Francisco.

Of course, we were interested in much more than Rippling’s new fundraise , so while we had Conrad on the phone, we talked turnover. We discussed the company’s new office lease in San Francisco (right now, it’s the second-biggest lease to be signed this year in the city). Conrad also shared why Rippling is relatively “free” of AI. You can hear that full conversation in podcast form ; if you prefer to read it, excerpts of that conversation follow, edited for length.

So why raise this money?

Honestly, it started out as just an employee tender . We wanted to find a way to get some liquidity for early employees, so we went to market, looking really to do about $200 million for employees that wanted to sell some stock. [But] we got a lot of investor interest, so we expanded it first to include a small amount of primary [capital] — mostly as a way to get more ownership for investors that were looking to buy more — and then beyond that, we ended up expanding into seed investors as well.

What does this secondary sale say about your plans to eventually go public? An IPO is a little bit in the distance?

I definitely think it’s a bit in the distance, but it’s not like a way of delaying [anything]. If anything, it’s probably nice if there are people who want to buy a house or [want more cash] because life happens. It’s great to relieve some of that pressure before you go public so that you don’t have tons of people selling as soon as they can in the public markets. 

Is this the first time employees have been able to sell some shares? 

It’s not. We did something in 2021. But it was smaller and the company was smaller, and it was a long time ago.

Do you worry about employees leaving after cashing out?

One of the things that we talked about internally when we launched it was, we said, ‘Look, the first rule of an employee tender is that you don’t talk about the tender internally or publicly.’ We don’t want to see anyone spiking the football, or something like that. And the second rule of the employee tender is, ‘see the first rule.’ This is a very private, personal thing, and I’m thrilled for everyone [participating]; if this makes a difference in [their] life, that’s great. But it’s not the destination. The game’s not over. 

How do you feel about turnover more generally? Some people don’t like to see it; other managers think it’s for the best. Elon Musk seems to be a fan, given the rate at which he turns over his executive team at Tesla.

The executive team at Rippling has been remarkably stable for a long time. A lot of the people on the team are people who I originally hired for those roles. Some of them are people I have long work histories with, even before this company. And certainly I always like to keep people. I mean, every once in a while, there’s an early Rippling employee who leaves the company, and I find it always just emotionally really sad when that happens, even if the company is going to be fine and they want to do something else or, you know, in some cases just kind of hang out. On a personal level, that’s always very difficult for me.

You newly leased 123,000 square feet in San Francisco for local employees, who are now back three days a week. How did you settle on that policy, and do you worry about retention or hiring?

We just think there’s an enormous amount of value of people being in the office together. We were never a company that was going remote. When we went remote temporarily during the pandemic, we said, this is for three weeks, and then we’re going back to the office. Of course, it was unfortunately a lot longer than that, but we were back in the office as soon as we could be. I think it’s possible for some companies to be fully remote, but it’s sort of like playing the game on hard mode. I think it’s a lot easier if people can get together in person; you get a lot done.

In the meantime, workforce management software is super crowded. You’re going up against a company that you famously co-founded and ran , Zenefits. There’s Paycor, Workday, Gusto, to name a few . . . 

The weird thing is that Rippling is not actually a [human capital management] HCM company. Everyone who has been building business software believes that the way to build the best business software is to build these extremely narrow, focused deep products. And I think it’s completely wrong. I think the way you build the best business software is to build a really broad product suite of deeply integrated and seamlessly interoperable products. Yes, we have a very strong HR and payroll suite, but we also have an IT and security suite; we have a spend management suite, where we do things like corporate cards and bill pay and expense reimbursements. Actually, we’re using the primary capital that we raised in this round to fund the R&D efforts for a new, fourth cloud that we intend to launch in a completely different area. 

The classic example of a company that builds software in this way is Microsoft. Microsoft is like the OG of compound software businesses. 

Speaking of Microsoft, what is your “AI strategy”? 

We are a company that is relatively free of any AI products right now. There’s some stuff that we’re working on. But I am always very skeptical of things that are, like, super trendy in Silicon Valley. So I can tell you what [our AI strategy] is not. I’m super skeptical of these chatbots. I don’t think anyone wants to chat with their HR software. 

I have to ask about a tweet related to our story about your new round. I saw [Benchmark general partner] Bill Gurley chimed in that “ Anti-focus ain’t cheap .” I wasn’t sure if that was laudatory or a dig. Do you know?

I assume given that it came from Bill that it’s a dig. And he’s not wrong that taking this opposite approach is expensive, particularly on the R&D side. If you look at Rippling financially, the thing that really stands out is how we spend on R&D. If you compare us to other HCM competitors — because you talked about the crowded HCM space — they spend an average of 10% of their revenue on R&D. Next year, Rippling is going to spend as much on R&D as [three rival companies] combined, and we have a much lower revenue footprint than the three. It’s definitely true that there’s a huge upfront investment phase in building what we’re building that obviously over time, as a percent of revenue, should come down. So he’s not wrong, but it’s a very explicit part of our strategy. What Bill might not totally understand is the benefit that you get from building software in this way; much higher upfront R&D costs [later result in] much higher sales and marketing efficiency. 

Has Bill ever done business with you?

No, I’ve never met Bill. He’s sort of a constant, low-grade antagonist, but I’ve never actually met him. 

I know he doesn’t get along very well with Marc Andreessen. 

Then Bill and I have that in common. Maybe we should meet up and grab a beer over that particular thing. 

US FAA to mandate use of safety tool by charter airlines, manufacturers

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"I train like an athlete": Celine Dion reveals how she manages stiff person's syndrome

The singer was diagnosed with a neurological disease in 2023, leading to the cancellation of all her tour dates, by nardos haile.

Celine Dion is opening up about her journey with stiff person's disease.

In a recent interview with Vogue France, the five-time Grammy winner gave an update about her health and said she was “well, but it’s a lot of work,” adding: “I’m taking it one day at a time.”  Dion was diagnosed with Moersch-Woltman syndrome , more commonly known as stiff-person syndrome, in May last year. The diagnosis led the 55-year-old singer to focus on her health, ultimately canceling her upcoming tour dates and halting live performances as the disorder affected her ability to walk and sing.

Since her diagnosis, Dion said she spends five days a week on “athletic, physical and vocal therapy.”

She continued, “I work on my toes, my knees, my calves, my fingers, my singing, my voice . . . I have to learn to live with it now and stop questioning myself. At the beginning I would ask myself: ‘Why me? How did this happen? What have I done? Is this my fault?’”

But Dion revealed that her perspective has since then shifted: "The way I see it, I have two choices. Either I train like an athlete and work super hard, or I switch off and it’s over, I stay at home, listen to my songs, stand in front of my mirror and sing to myself. I’ve chosen to work with all my body and soul, from head to toe, with a medical team. I want to be the best I can be. My goal is to see the Eiffel Tower again.”

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April 26, 2024

• Lessons From Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour: Adapting to Change in K-12

It’s no secret that Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour (and her catalog of music) is making a massive impact on pop culture and economies worldwide. It’s projected that the Eras tour could gross $2.2 billion in North American ticket sales alone, according to survey data provided to CNN. That doesn’t include the economic ripple effect that happens as Taylor Swift fans (a.k.a. swifties) sell out hotels and fill restaurants in any city where she performs.

Quotes from Swift’s song lyrics and stories about her relationship history have also become an integral part of today’s pop culture vocabulary. Her music and legacy dominate conversations across traditional and social media.

None of these successes are accidental. Taylor Swift is the master of her own story. And she’s mastered adapting to change. Like Swift, K-12 schools are often faced with external factors that require adaptation—including technology innovations, changing federal funding, and new expectations from families. Here are a few takeaways from the Eras Tour that can help schools better adapt to the changes that impact them.

Turn Difficult Circumstances Into Growth Opportunities

Many factors contributed to the Eras Tour’s success. Timing is among these factors , as TIME Magazine points out. In a post-COVID-19 world, people craved a concert experience that would get them out of the house. Taylor Swift strategically capitalized on this desire, swooping in at the perfect moment to give fans what they were looking for.

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic changed the entertainment industry, it also impacted the education landscape. Though students have been back in the classroom for a while, schools still experience residual effects from the pandemic on student mental health, social skills, and maturity levels. One strategy for addressing these challenges is emphasizing social and emotional learning (SEL), which helps young people apply knowledge and skills to manage emotions and maintain supportive relationships.

Schools can also adapt to digital changes brought on by the pandemic by implementing practices to thoroughly track and better understand student behaviors. An effective student information system can make this process simple for teachers, while automatically syncing this data to a student’s account, providing easy access for parents.

Master Marketing to the Right Audience

Not only is Taylor Swift an engaging performer—she is a master marketer. Writer Marc Schneider with Billboard noted that “she understands her audience and has cultivated an iron-clad personal brand through her genuine connection with them.”

Knowing what your audience wants and needs is as essential for K-12 school administrators—especially those who work for private or independent schools—as it is for entertainers.

But who is the primary audience for K-12? Many parents preparing to send their children to school today are a part of Generation Z, which includes anyone born between 1997-2012 . They are a generation who grew up with technology integrated into every aspect of life, making them more inclined to seek information and communicate online. Phone calls are replaced by text messages and research about schools takes place online rather than in person.

Just as Taylor Swift switches up her marketing strategy to appeal to the changing interests of her audience, schools need to adapt to succeed. This can include a responsive, mobile-friendly website , direct messaging capabilities, and a strong presence on social media platforms.

Additionally, today’s parents desire to provide their children with high-quality education that is also affordable. Using technology that gives families the option to set up tuition payment plans makes education more accessible while serving as a crucial marketing tool for a school. Check out this blog post for more tips on marketing to Gen Z parents.

Lean Into the Current Era

A major part of mastering the skill of adapting to change is learning how to reinvent yourself. Taylor Swift is certainly an expert on this. Her first album, which was released in 2006, was a country record. But Swift has since branched out into multiple other genres including pop, electropop, indie folk, and rock (check out Billboard’s article for a full breakdown).

But what does this flexibility to switch genres say about Swift’s ability to adapt to change? While this acts as another marketing strategy (adding more genres to your repertoire is a great way to expand your fanbase), it also speaks to Swift’s fearlessness in responding to the external events that impact her. Rather than letting relationship breakups, public criticism, or shady record labels hinder her success, she leans in and makes those challenges work to her advantage.

K-12 schools are also frequently faced with external changes they can’t control. But like Swift, they can control how they respond to those changes. Quickly and effectively reacting to things like the upcoming expiration of EANS and ESSER , rising cybersecurity threats , and summer learning loss can have a massive impact on long-term success.

Mollie Nolan

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