The Booking Agent's Checklist: 54 checks between a midnight DM and a signed fee

TL;DR

• Most small agencies run on inbox archaeology: enquiries arrive half-complete across email, DMs and WhatsApp, get answered in arrival order rather than value order, and the roster's public presence is a PDF from two seasons ago. Every slow answer is a fee that went to a faster agent.
• Build one front door. A structured form captures date, venue, capacity, budget and billing position at submission time, so qualification happens before you type a reply.
• Hold a response standard: acknowledge within one working day, give a real answer or a clear decline within three. Declining fast protects the relationship. Declining slowly burns it.
• Get the paperwork right on the four things that cost money: the radius clause, the deposit when a show falls over, who holds the PRS licence, and withholding tax abroad. If your UK agency touches artist fees, the Conduct Regulations 2003 make you a trustee of that money, with a ten-day limit. Most agencies have never heard of it.
• Promoters compare your artist's fee against your artist's actual draw. The sanction for over-claiming is silent: they pay it once and never book the act again.
• Track four numbers per artist per territory - enquiry volume, conversion, response time, rebook rate - and bring them to every fee conversation. Feel loses to a buyer with a spreadsheet.

The problem: the fee you never invoiced

There are fewer rooms and they are harder to fill. Music Venue Trust recorded 801 grassroots venues trading in the UK in 2025, down from 810, and that net nine hides the churn: 78 rooms left the circuit, replaced by 69 newly recognised ones. The survivors ran on an average profit margin of 2.5%, and 53.8% reported no profit at all (MVT Annual Report 2025).

Two things follow from that, and the second is the one agencies feel. MVT calls 2025 the slowest rate of decline since 2018, so the floor may be arriving, but the touring circuit itself has already collapsed underneath it: an average grassroots tour ran 21.9 shows in 1994 and 10.9 in 2024, and by 2024 just 12 locations, all major cities, were left on the primary and secondary circuits. 175 towns and cities that still have a grassroots venue no longer receive regular touring shows at all, covering an estimated 25 million people (MVT Annual Report 2024 and 2025). Your routing map has fewer pins on it than it did, whatever your roster is doing.

So every enquiry reaching your agency is worth more than it was five years ago. And in most agencies, the thing between an enquiry and a confirmed fee is a pile of unread messages.

Here is how it goes. A promoter in Rotterdam DMs your artist on a Friday night: "hey, any availability in November?" No date, no venue, no budget. Your artist screenshots it to you on Sunday. You reply Tuesday asking the questions the DM never answered. The promoter has already emailed two other agents, one of whom replied Saturday morning with a fee and a link to a page that answered everything else.

You did not lose that booking on talent. You lost it on plumbing. And the cost stays invisible because lost deals appear nowhere: no spreadsheet has a line for "enquiries we answered too slowly".

What you're probably doing wrong

Be honest about how many describe your agency this month:

1. Enquiries arrive on five channels and live on none. Nowhere holds "everything that came in this week".
2. You answer in arrival order, not value order. The festival offer waits behind a student night that was never going to clear the artist's minimum.
3. Every enquiry starts a twenty-question thread. Three replies spent extracting what one form could have captured.
4. Two people answer the same enquiry, and nobody answers the other one. Without a shared view, double-replies and silent drops are guaranteed.
5. Your roster's public presence is stale. The buyer still has to ring to find out whether the act plays live or DJs.
6. Holds live in one person's head. Three weeks later two promoters both believe they have the same Saturday.
7. You decline slowly, or not at all. To the promoter, silence reads as contempt. And promoters talk.
8. Your paperwork is a deal memo you never read properly. The radius clause you accepted quietly blocks a better offer four months out.
9. You over-claim the draw. You get the fee once, you do not get booked again, and nobody tells you why.
10. You negotiate on anecdote. No record of enquiry volume, conversion or territory demand, so every fee conversation runs on feel.

None of this is a moral failing. It is what happens when a relationship business grows up inside tools built for correspondence, not deals.

Why listen to us

We built the platform that runs websites, CRM, campaigns and enquiry intake for agencies, labels, artists and promoters, so we see how enquiries arrive, how fast they get answered, and where they leak. We also come at this from the other side of the booth: between us we have DJed and produced, promoted our own nights, run labels, and stood at a half-empty door at 11pm wondering where the guest list went.

Everything here can be done manually, with free tools and discipline. We will point out where a spreadsheet is genuinely enough.

The system

Seven steps. Each works on its own. Together they turn your agency from an inbox into an operation.

1. One front door: what should a booking request form ask?

A booking request form should capture everything you need to qualify an enquiry at the moment it is submitted: date, venue, capacity, budget range and billing position, plus who is asking. No enquiry lands half-baked again.

Publish one form, link it everywhere a buyer might find you, and route every enquiry through it. When a promoter DMs, your reply is one warm line and the link. That is not cold. It is bookable. Required fields are marked; everything else is optional, because a form that demands an essay gets abandoned.

• Artist enquired about (required) - a picker over your roster, so nothing arrives addressed to "one of your DJs". Let them choose more than one: a b2b or a label showcase is one date and one fee against several artists, and a form that takes one name forces the buyer to describe the rest in prose you then have to re-read
• Event date (required), plus a "date flexible" checkbox
• Venue or event name, and city/country (required)
• Capacity (required)
• Ticket price, or expected range - with capacity, your fastest sanity check on whether the fee is real. A 250-cap room at £12 holds roughly £3,000 of gross ticket income before costs. If the offer is £2,500, the promoter is either mistaken or relying on the bar
• Event type - club night, festival, private event, support slot, livestream
• Budget range or offer (required) - a range is fine; "TBC" is a data point too
• Billing position offered - headline, co-headline, support, undecided
• Set length wanted, and whether you want a DJ or live set if the artist does both
• Other acts confirmed or targeted - the bill tells you more about the night than the venue does
• Promoter name (required), plus company and role
• Contact email and phone (required)
• Links to past events - a poster, a ticket page, an aftermovie
• Response deadline - when they need an answer by

Define one term now, because it decides fees: billing position is where the artist sits on the line-up and the poster, from headliner down to opening support, and it should be priced differently at every level.

Two rules. Reply to form submissions faster than anything else, so the front door trains itself. And keep a free-text box at the end: the structured fields qualify the deal, the free text tells you who you are dealing with.

Catch the DMs too. On Instagram, a keyword rule answers a comment or DM containing "booking" with one warm line and your form link; on WhatsApp, a rule replies to any inbound message and a Flow can put a form inside the chat. Two limits: keyword matching is not comprehension, so pick words buyers type ("book", "booking", "availability", "avails"), and an in-chat WhatsApp form needs Meta's approval and the 24-hour window unless sent on an approved template.

Shortcut: SoundOps ships this form, on your own domain or dropped onto any page, with the fields above already built: the multi-artist roster picker, a real date picker, numeric capacity and ticket price, and the dropdowns. A half-filled submission is refused rather than landing for you to chase. Every submission opens a deal with the promoter filed in your CRM.

2. The qualification pass: how fast should a booking agency respond?

Acknowledge every enquiry within one working day, and give a substantive answer, meaning a real offer conversation or a clear decline, within three. Buyers rarely tell you they noticed. They just book the agent who replied.

Patci Weil of Wilde Agency in Berlin named it directly: a good agent "takes full responsibility for the artist's business matters" and is reachable, responsive and organised (Attack Magazine). Responsiveness is not admin. It is the product.

The acknowledgement is not a commitment: "Got this, thanks - checking the diary, I'll come back to you by Thursday" takes thirty seconds. What kills deals is not "not yet". It is silence. Then run the pass in value order:

• Is the date actually available? Avails, short for availabilities, are the dates an artist is free to be booked, and you should be able to answer an avails question from your own records in under a minute.
• Does the budget clear the artist's realistic range for that territory and billing? If the range is missing, ask once, directly, in your first reply.
• Is the buyer real? Past events, a verifiable venue, a ticket link, and which legal entity you would be contracting with: a promoter trading through a limited company that fails leaves your artist an unsecured creditor. When Gracenote Promotion Ltd went into administration on 6 July 2026, eight days after its Morvala Festival on the Rame Peninsula, dozens of performers, crew and suppliers were left unpaid: the technical production manager was out more than £9,000, the site manager £10,000 (ITV News West Country, July 2026).
• Does the gig serve the artist? Right room, right bill, right moment in the campaign. Some well-paid gigs are still the wrong gigs.

The decline-fast rule. If the answer is no, say so within the same three days, warmly, with a reason and a door left open: "Budget's short for a headline slot, but keep us posted on the bigger room." A fast, warm no is a relationship deposit; a slow one is a withdrawal you never see on any statement. And if you are declining on your artist's behalf, make sure it is a decision you could defend to them. The DJ Eric Cloutier told Mixmag: "I know for a fact that DJs don't know what's happening with their agents."

Holds versus confirms. Sloppy language here double-books artists. A hold is a provisional, dated pencil on the diary: the promoter has serious intent, and you check with them before giving the date away. Holds are ranked first, second and third. A challenge forces the higher hold to confirm or release, usually within 24 or 48 hours. A confirm is a committed booking, and the contract process starts.

Two things to be clear about. A confirm is an industry custom, not a legal event: the binding document is the signed contract or deal memo. And every hold needs three things written where the team can see them: who holds it, what was discussed, and when it expires. A hold with no expiry is not a hold. It is a slow leak.

3. The roster shop window: what should a booking agency roster page include?

A roster page should let a serious buyer decide to make an offer without phoning you. Per artist: a short current bio, the sound itself, recent photos, tech basics, territories, and a direct route to enquire. If a buyer has to call to find out whether the act DJs or plays live, the page failed.

A PDF one-sheet is fine as a download. As the page itself it fails: out of date the week after you export it, unable to play music, unable to capture an enquiry. Build one page per artist instead, with the PDF attached, answering the six questions every buyer has:

1. Who are they? A 100 to 150 word third-person bio for a promoter reading at speed: what they play, what they have done lately, why a room books them. Update every season, not every album cycle.
2. What do they sound like? Two or three current embeds. A buyer decides in ninety seconds of listening, so make sure it is this year's.
3. What do they look like on a poster? Three to five recent high-resolution photos with credits, downloadable, so the promoter's designer is never emailing you at midnight.
4. What do they need? Tech basics only: DJ or live, format, headline spec items. The technical rider goes to the promoter before they confirm, so the venue can check it; the full rider follows during advancing.
5. Where do they work? Territories the artist actively plays, and any regions with upcoming runs.
6. How do I enquire? The form from step one, and a named contact per territory if you split them.

Updating a page must take minutes, or it will not happen. A current page signals a managed artist; a stale one signals an unmanaged roster, and buyers price that in.

Shortcut: SoundOps gives each artist a profile page and unlimited custom pages on your own domain, editable in minutes by anyone on the team you permit.

4. The pipeline: what stages should a booking pipeline have?

A booking pipeline is the shared, visible list of every deal in motion, with a status, an owner and a due date on each. The statuses that matter run from enquiry to played:

1. New enquiry - arrived through the front door, nobody has touched it
2. Qualifying - checking avails, budget, buyer credibility; chasing missing information
3. Negotiating - a real conversation about fee, billing and terms is live
4. Hold - the date is pencilled, with a written expiry and a hold rank
5. Confirmed - terms agreed; contract and deposit move
6. Advancing - logistics: travel, timings, tech, guest list
7. Played - the show happened
8. Followed up - the post-show note has gone and the rebook seed is planted

Plus two exits, Declined and Lost, so deals that end leave the board with a reason rather than evaporating.

The mechanics matter more than the labels:

• Every deal has exactly one owner. Not a team, one name. Shared ownership is how enquiries get double-answered and dropped at the same time.
• Every deal has a next action and a due date. "Waiting on promoter" is allowed only with a chase date attached.
• Stalls get flagged, not discovered. Any deal untouched for five working days should surface itself. The expensive failures are never dramatic. They are quiet.
• Advancing is a checklist, not a memory. Weil describes the sequence plainly: confirmation, then contract and invoice, then the press kit so marketing can start, then flights, transit and accommodation, and finally the artist's info sheet. Same order, every time.
• Fifteen minutes, once a week, whole team. Walk the board top to bottom. This one meeting replaces most of the "did anyone reply to..." messages in your group chat.

A generic kanban tool will fight you here, since most cap you at three or four columns. A shared sheet with one row per deal, filtered by owner, genuinely works. Do not let tooling stop you starting.

Shortcut: SoundOps has a bookings pipeline with exactly these stages, a named owner and a next action with its due date on each deal, ranked holds that carry both an expiry and the terms they were given on, and the promoter and artist as real linked records. Stage changes are timestamped, which is what makes the numbers in step seven exist at all. The stall rule runs by itself: a deal untouched for five working days, a hold about to lapse or a next action gone past is flagged to its owner the next morning.

5. The paperwork: what should a live booking contract cover?

A contract should answer four questions before anything else: what is the fee and when does it arrive, what happens if the show does not, where else can the artist play, and who pays the tax. Get those right and you have covered most of the money.

The detail is where agencies quietly lose. Define what "net" means and cap the costs that come off it. Say whether the deposit survives a cancellation and who holds it. Read the radius clause and negotiate it, because they are close to universally negotiable and the remedy for breach is usually financial rather than an injunction. Name who holds the PRS licence rather than assuming it is the venue. Withhold recording and streaming rights unless you have agreed them separately. And on international dates, file for withholding relief at confirm, not at settlement: the UK needs form FEU8 at least 30 days before payment is due, and the US needs a Central Withholding Agreement, applied for on IRS form 13930 at least 45 days before the first event. On a club date confirmed six weeks out, the UK deadline is already close and the US one has passed, which is why the filing belongs on the day you confirm.

One more, because almost no UK agency knows it. If your agency receives artist fees into its own account, regulation 25 of the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 makes you trustee of that money. In full: it goes into a client account whose name includes the word "client", you cannot hold it beyond ten days from receipt unless the artist has asked you to, you must pay it out by the end of the second business day after they request it, anything still held at thirty days needs a statement every thirty days after that, and the accounts must be inspected by an independent person within ten months of the period end. Running artist fees through the general business account is common and is not compliant. This one is UK law only: if you are reading from the US or the EU, check your own rules rather than assuming this is the standard, because the trustee duty is what makes it unusual.

The full contract review sheet is in the PDF: all eleven checks as a page you run against every deal memo, an annotated radius clause showing what each phrase does and what to ask for instead, the withholding lead times drawn against a real confirm-to-show window, and the negotiation asks written out as phrases you can paste into an email.

6. The relationship layer: how do booking agencies keep promoters coming back?

Promoters rebook artists through agents who make their lives easy, remember their rooms, and follow up. That is a system, not a personality trait, and it runs on five habits: a real contact base, targeted announcements, showing up, never claiming a draw you cannot evidence, and a post-show follow-up inside 72 hours.

Build the contact base. Every promoter, talent buyer and venue programmer goes in one place, with the fields that make the list useful later: territory and city, venue type, capacity band, genres they book, which of your artists they have booked, and when you last worked together. An hour of setup and ten seconds per deal turns your sent folder into an asset the agency owns rather than something living in one person's laptop.

Segment before you announce. A roster announcement sent to everyone is noise; sent to the right forty buyers it is service. "Techno buyers, Netherlands and Belgium, rooms 300 to 800 capacity" is a segment. "Everyone" is an apology. It can only go to promoters who opted in to your news, so ask for that on your booking form. Email carries the detail, and cross-industry studies commonly cite roughly $36 per $1 spent (Litmus, 2020); the DMA's 2026 UK tracker puts it at around £41 per £1.

The roster-announcement email skeleton. Steal this structure:

Subject: [Agency] roster news: [Artist] - [the hook, e.g. "joins the roster" or "EU avails, March to May"]

Line one, the news: "We have signed [Artist]" or "[Artist] has a run of [territory] dates open in [window]."

Line two, why this reaches you: "You are getting this because you book [genre] in [territory]" - one warm sentence, not a database dump.

The sound: two links, latest release and a recent mix or live clip.

The proof: one line of recent momentum: standout shows, notable support, a milestone.

The ask: the window you are selling and the booking-request link. One ask, not three.

Sign-off: a named agent, direct email, phone.

Eight lines. A buyer reads it in thirty seconds and knows what to do next.

Now the part no software does: show up. Alexandra Ismalone, agent to Ben Klock and others at Circle Booking in Berlin, described the job as "going to gigs with your artist, and being present in the scene, not just behind your computer in an office" (Resident Advisor). It compounds, and it is remembered: Alex Bruford of ATC Live and ROAM traces his business to shows he settled himself two decades ago, and remembers who was decent to him early - "It's those people that pick up the phone and give you the support when nothing's going on that really stick in your mind" (IQ Magazine). Go to the shows, especially the local ones, and learn what their room does on a Thursday.

Assume you are overheard, too. Green rooms leak, and what you say about a promoter's door split travels in a worse version than you said it. Reputation is the currency: "If your agent has a good reputation, then a promoter is more likely to take risks" (Resident Advisor).

Do not over-claim the draw. The fastest way to burn a room, and the sanction is invisible. Andy Blackett, fabric's programme director, on agents inflating what an artist sells: "There are a lot of agents out there that are newer to the game who think their artist is worth more money each time. They would say, 'We sold out the venue.' Well, did you sell out the venue? Or did I sell out the venue?" And the consequence: "they'll pay somebody the £8,000 they wanted, lose a load of money, and never book the artist again." Assume they will find out, because they compare notes: "We might be competing, but we're all telling each other what the bar spend was, how many tickets we sold, what the fees are" (Mixmag, 2019). Agents run the same network in the other direction, so both sides are sharing intelligence about you.

Share risk when it makes the show happen. The agent who only pushes the fee up wins the transaction and loses the relationship. fabric has described sliding-scale deals where a flat £7,000 becomes a £4,000 floor with £10,000 on a sell-out (Mixmag, 2019): the artist takes some downside, the club saves £3,000 on a bad night, and the show that would not have happened does. Keira Sinclair of POLY. Artists asks promoters who cannot meet a fee to show their budget, income and costs, so the deal is built from numbers rather than a standoff (Mixmag). Play it long, as Barry Davies of One House does by telling promoters he wants their big, middle and small acts: a promoter who knows the big act is coming will take a chance on the small one now.

The 72-hour follow-up. After every show, the owning agent sends a short note within three days: thanks, one genuine specific from the night, a request for feedback, and the rebook seed: "She is back in the region in March if the room is free." Two minutes, and it is the difference between a gig and a relationship.

7. The data habit: how do you use booking data in fee conversations?

Track four numbers per artist per territory, review them monthly, and bring them to every fee negotiation: enquiry volume, conversion rate from enquiry to confirmed, average response time, and rebook rate. Data does not replace judgement, but it ends negotiating on anecdote.

Because every enquiry arrives through one front door and every deal moves through visible statuses, these numbers exist as a by-product. You are reading exhaust, not adding admin:

• Enquiry volume per artist per territory tells you where demand is building before fees reflect it. Twelve German enquiries in a quarter for an artist who has never played Germany is a routing instruction.
• Conversion rate tells you whether the problem is demand or handling. High enquiries and low confirms usually means fees are mispitched for the territory, or the qualification pass is leaking.
• Response time is the number you control completely. When it drifts, deals are quietly dying whatever the talent is doing.
• Rebook rate is the truth about whether the shows are working. A promoter who books the same artist twice is telling you the fee has headroom. A promoter who does not, after paying what you asked, is telling you something else.

Then use it. A monthly half-hour decides which artist gets the announcement, which territory gets a run, which stalled relationship gets a call. Outside the agency it changes the conversation, because "demand for her in your region has climbed all year and the last two rooms rebooked" is a sentence a buyer cannot wave away, and you can only say it if you counted. It also keeps a roster honest in size: Bruford is blunt that "having a personal roster with 100 acts doesn't seem fair on the clients", and your numbers will say when you have taken on one artist too many long before the artist does.

Where SoundOps fits

You can run all of this with a form builder, a spreadsheet, a kanban app, a mailing tool and a shared drive: five subscriptions and a lot of duct tape. SoundOps exists to be the one place instead.

• The front door is a booking request form on your own domain, with a real date picker, numeric capacity and ticket price, a DJ-or-live choice, and validation that rejects a half-filled submission. Every submission opens a deal, hands it to whoever you've chosen to own new enquiries, and files the promoter in your CRM with the capacity of the room they asked about. Switch on the ready-made acknowledgement and the promoter hears back within minutes. Instagram and WhatsApp keyword rules catch the DMs, and a WhatsApp link can open a chat with the enquiry already written.
• The shop window is artist profile pages and unlimited custom pages on your own domain, with bios, embeds, galleries, socials, format, tech basics, territories and downloadable press-kit files.
• The relationship layer is a CRM with promoter and agent roles, genres, country, region and city, the capacity and type of the venue each promoter books, dynamic segments that can select on all of those (a capacity range, or several countries at once) and CSV import and export, feeding campaigns from your own verified domain with SMS and WhatsApp alongside and a deliverability score before you send.
• The pipeline is a deal board with the eight stages plus Declined and Lost, a named owner and a dated next action on each deal, ranked holds with expiries and the terms they were given on, several artists on one deal for a b2b, an append-only record of every offer and its deal shape (flat fee, door split, guarantee versus percentage, or guarantee plus bonus), a running note log, a one-to-one email to the promoter logged on the deal, and contracts and riders filed against it. Each stage shows the next step as a single button. Accepting a recorded offer confirms the deal on those terms rather than making you retype them.
• The chasing is the part you do not do. Open a deal for an artist already held that night and the page says so and links to the clash, which is the under-a-minute avails answer from step two. The morning after something needs attention, its owner is told: a hold about to expire, a next action gone past, a deal untouched for five working days, a show played without a follow-up. Confirmed deals whose date has passed move to Played on their own.
• The calendar puts every live deal alongside your events, colour-coded by stage, with a per-artist availability lane and a feed you can subscribe to from Google or Apple Calendar. Days an artist can't work are blocked by you, or by the artist through their own private link with no login, and any deal on a blocked day warns you.
• The numbers are the four in step seven, per artist and per territory, with enquiries, conversion and response time also split by channel. Response time runs to the moment your team marks the deal replied, so where nobody logged it the tile says so rather than a flattering zero.
• The team works under 13 permission scopes, with one caveat before you hand out a login: bookings sit inside the events permission, so anyone who can see the pipeline can see the fees on it. Starter is a single seat, Growth is five.

And the honest gaps: SoundOps does not do contracts, invoicing or settlement, it will not chase a deposit, and it does not send formal quotes. You can email the promoter from the deal and every message is logged there, but offers are recorded rather than sent, and replies still land in your own inbox. A signed contract can be filed against a booking, on signed expiring links for logged-in admins only, but the drafting, the signing and the money stay where they are today. Response time is measured in elapsed time, not working hours, and isn't split per agent. Artists don't get a login: they get a private link to mark the days they can't work.

Plans start at £19/month, every core feature is on every plan, and there is a 14-day free trial on Starter plus a 14-day money-back guarantee on your first subscription payment.

The condensed checklist

Fifty-four checks. Work top to bottom. An agency that can tick all of these does not lose fees to its own admin.

The front door (7)

• One structured booking-request form live
• It captures date, venue, city, capacity, ticket price, event type, budget range, billing position, promoter details and response deadline
• Form linked from the roster page, every artist page, email signatures, Instagram bio and WhatsApp auto-reply
• Every DM enquiry answered with one warm line plus the form link
• Instagram keyword reply live on the words buyers actually type
• WhatsApp auto-reply live, with an in-chat form approved in advance if you use one
• A free-text box on the form, because the structured fields qualify the deal and the free text tells you who you are dealing with

The qualification pass (8)

• Acknowledgement within one working day
• Substantive answer or decline within three
• Worked in value order, not arrival order
• Avails answerable from your own records in under a minute
• Buyer credibility checked, including which legal entity you would contract with
• Declines sent fast, warm, with a reason and an open door
• Every hold written down with holder, rank, terms discussed and expiry date
• Hold, challenge and confirm used consistently across the team

The shop window (7)

• One page per artist, not a PDF
• Current 100 to 150 word bio, refreshed every season
• Two or three embeds from this year
• Three to five recent high-resolution photos with credits, downloadable
• Tech basics: DJ or live, format, headline spec items
• Territories the artist actively works
• No buyer question that needs a phone call to answer

The pipeline (7)

• Every deal on one shared board
• Eight live statuses plus Declined and Lost with reasons
• Exactly one named owner per deal
• One dated next action per deal
• Stalled deals flagged after five working days
• Advancing runs as a fixed checklist in a fixed order
• Fifteen-minute weekly board walk with the whole team

The paperwork (11)

• Nothing confirmed on a verbal alone: memo in writing the same day
• Fee structure stated, and "net" defined with capped expenses
• Deposit amount, timing, and what happens to it on cancellation
• Radius clause read, negotiated, and its "after" window challenged
• Cancellation terms symmetrical in structure and explicit about the money
• Force majeure names the events and says what happens to the deposit and sunk costs
• Illness handled separately, with the certification standard stated
• Recording and streaming rights expressly withheld unless separately agreed
• PRS/PPL responsibility named and warranted
• Merch terms stated, soft goods separated from recorded music
• International dates: withholding addressed, and relief filed at confirm (UK FEU8 30 days, US CWA 45 days)

Agency compliance (3)

• If you receive artist fees, a client account exists with "client" in its name
• Artist money held no longer than ten days, paid out by the end of the second business day on request
• Accounts independently inspected within ten months of the period end

The relationship layer (7)

• Every promoter in the contact base with territory, venue type, capacity band, genres and last-worked date
• Roster announcements sent to segments of promoters who opted in, never to everyone
• You attend shows, especially local ones, and stand with the promoter
• You never quote a draw you cannot evidence
• Risk-sharing deal structures offered where they make a show happen
• Nothing said in a green room you would not say to the room
• Post-show follow-up within 72 hours, every show, with the rebook seed planted

The data habit (4)

• Enquiry volume tracked per artist per territory
• Enquiry-to-confirmed conversion tracked
• Response time tracked per agent and per month
• Rebook rate tracked, reviewed monthly, and brought to fee conversations