Stage Portal Blog

What Venues Actually Need From Bands Before a Show

I was in a room full of venue operators last week. The conversation kept coming back to one thing.

Last week the Stage Portal team was at Music Venue Trust's Venues Day. A room full of grassroots venue operators from across the UK, talking honestly about what it actually takes to keep live music going right now.

There was plenty on the agenda. Costs. Licensing. The pressure on margins. The broader fight to keep grassroots venues open. But one thing kept coming up in almost every conversation, in one form or another. Not the big existential stuff. Something more operational, more day-to-day, and in some ways more fixable.

Bands.

Specifically: getting basic show information from bands, in a usable format, before the day of the show.

Not because bands are difficult to work with. Not because venues are unreasonable in what they ask for. But because there is no standard way for that information to travel between an artist and a venue, and the gap that creates causes real problems on both sides every single week. I want to share what I heard in that room. Because if you are a band reading this, this is a conversation you are not usually part of. And it is worth knowing what is being said.

What Usually Happens When Bands Share Information

Picture a typical Friday night at a grassroots venue. Three bands on the bill. Doors at seven. The venue's production person, often a freelancer who has been brought in for the night, arrives a couple of hours before to get set up.

Before they can do that properly, they need to know what each band needs. How many channels. What's on stage. Who is bringing their own gear and who needs backline. Whether the headliners' drummer needs a drum riser or whether there is even room for one.

So they go looking for the riders.

One band sent theirs three weeks ago as a PDF attached to an email. Nobody can find the email. The PDF may have had the wrong spec anyway because it was built for a different venue.

One band sent a message on Instagram. It said 'we just need a couple of mics and a DI, is that ok?' No stage plot. No input list.

One band hasn't sent anything. They will explain it all when they arrive at six-thirty, half an hour before the other bands start loading in.

The production person improvises. The show goes ahead. But it costs time, creates stress, and the result on stage is often worse than it needed to be.

Having worked with venues and bands on hundred of shows I can tell you that this is not an exaggerated scenario. It is the standard experience at a significant number of grassroots shows.

What Venues Said They Actually Need

I want to be clear about something: the frustration I heard at Venues Day was not about bands being difficult or unprofessional. It was about the absence of a shared system. Venues are not asking for anything complicated. The ask is achievable for bands of all sizes.
One send. With everything in one place.

Not a folder of attachments. Not a chain of follow-up messages across three different platforms. A single thing they can open and find what they need, before the day of the show.

When I asked what specifically they needed in that single send, the list was consistent across every venue I spoke to:

• An input list, channel by channel, labelled clearly, so the engineer can build the mix before the band arrives
• Monitor requirements 
• Backline and any specific equipment needs. 
• An agreed set time and load-in time, confirmed, not approximate
• A phone number for the day, one person from the band who will actually pick up
• A stage plot, who stands where, where the kit goes, where the monitors need to be

 

That is the key list. Most of which take less than an hour to put together. Also what can be included is EPK information for promotion etc but this is the key logistical list that venues need. 

Why Most Bands Get This Wrong (And Why It Is Not Their Fault)

Here is the thing I want bands to take from this, because it matters: the venues talking about this problem are not angry at bands. They are frustrated with a broken system.

Bands do not have a clear picture of what the other side of a booking actually involves. Nobody teaches you, when you are starting out, what a venue needs to know before your show. You learn by doing, by watching more experienced bands, or by having a production person pull you aside after a chaotic soundcheck and explain it to you. If you are lucky.

And the tools that exist for sending this information were not built for how grassroots music actually works. You end up with a rider that lives in someone's email drafts from 2022. A stage plot someone drew in PowerPoint that gets attached to an enquiry email and never updated. An input list that exists in the sound engineer's head and gets communicated verbally at load-in.

The information exists. It just has no consistent home and no reliable way to travel.

What venues are asking for is not more effort from bands. It is more organisation. And that is a much easier problem to solve.

When we speak to most bands there is this misconception that only bigger bands can send through a rider, as its seen as a list of demands. But what it actually is, is a document highlighting your requirements that all bands should send. 

What a Good Pre-Show Send Actually Looks Like

What a Good Pre-Show Send Actually Looks Like

The entire thing takes less than ten minutes once your documents are built. The effort is in building them properly the first time. After that, every show you play gets easier. By sending this information across it means the venue team can be prepared and see any problems that might arise ahead of time, not just hours before the gig. 

The Professional Habit That Changes How Venues See Your Band

There is a version of this conversation that is purely practical: send the right information, at the right time, in the right format, so that shows run better. That is true, and it is worth doing for that reason alone.

But there is a bigger picture here, and I think it is worth saying clearly.
Venues talk to each other. They share recommendations informally, they mention bands in passing, they have a mental list of acts they will book again without a second thought and acts they will hesitate over. Being on the right side of that list is not just about the quality of your set. It is about what it is like to work with you.

The band that sends everything across cleanly, before anyone has to ask, in a format that the venue's sound engineer can actually use, gets remembered. Not because it is impressive. Because it is rare enough to stand out.

And at grassroots level, where the margins are tight and everyone is doing multiple jobs at once, the bands that make things easier tend to get more shows. That is not a theory. When running venues and shows, if we had space the bands that were easy to work with were always first on the list to call. 

The Short Version

Venues are not asking for a lot. They are asking for one send, one format, everything in one place, before show day. With the key information that they need to be able to get you on stage and sounding your best.

If you are a band that does not currently have these things sorted, the good news is that it is a one-time job. Build them properly once and every show after that gets easier.

If you are a venue operator who spent any time at Venues Day last week nodding along to this conversation, share this with the bands you work with.