Live Index Tour Builder

A tour is two problems at once. The first is geographic: a sequence of cities that can actually be driven in the days available, without a leg that arrives at load-in after the doors were meant to open. The second is arithmetic: whether the guarantee, the ticket price, the room's capacity and the show expenses leave anything behind once the routing is paid for. Most planning still happens in a spreadsheet that models one of those problems and not the other. This tool holds both in one place, keeps the arithmetic explicit, and never fills in a number you did not enter.

It is built for the people who actually assemble a run of dates: bands and solo artists costing a tour before they accept it, agents and managers comparing offers across a routing, and talent buyers, promoters and independent venues checking whether a date clears at the attendance they realistically expect. Every derived figure states its formula, and every check names the value that triggered it. Nothing here is a proprietary score.

The tour you build stays in your browser. There is no account, no paywall, no upsell and no external service in the loop — the calculations run locally and the file is yours to export. What the tool will not do is invent data: it estimates no mileage, no drive time and no market demand, because a routing decision made against a fabricated distance is worse than no estimate at all.

How the numbers are calculated

Every figure below is deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same result, and an absent input produces no result rather than a default.

Gross potential

Venue capacity multiplied by the average ticket price. It is the ceiling of the primary box office at the price entered, not a forecast.

Modeled gross

Expected paid attendance multiplied by the average ticket price. Comps, holds and fees are outside the model; the price entered is whatever basis the user chooses to work in.

Eligible basis (simplified)

For a versus deal, the modeled gross less the show expenses entered, floored at zero. Real contracts define the net box office in far more detail, with capped expenses, approved budgets and disputed line items. This is a stated simplification, not a model of a settlement sheet.

Backend and settlement

The backend is the artist percentage applied to the eligible basis. A versus deal settles at the greater of the guarantee and the backend; a flat deal settles at the guarantee alone.

Promoter remainder

Modeled gross less show expenses less the artist settlement. It is a pre-overhead result for the date, not accounting profit: staff, rent, marketing carried across a season, insurance and tax sit outside it.

Break-even paid attendance

The paid attendance at which the remainder reaches zero, which is where the modeled gross covers the expenses and the guarantee. It is reported as unavailable when the price is missing or zero, when no guarantee is entered, or when an artist percentage of 100 or more means additional tickets cannot close the gap.

Travel and hotel

A leg's travel cost is the override where one is entered, otherwise the entered mileage multiplied by the per-mile cost. No mileage is estimated, so a leg without entered distance contributes nothing and is counted as such in the totals.

Route health

Route health is a list of factual findings, not a rating. It reports drive legs above the maximum you set — only where a drive time was actually entered — runs longer than your consecutive-show limit, confirmed or held dates missing a city, venue or date, expected attendance above the entered capacity, dates where the promoter remainder is negative under the simplified model, duplicate dates, and open windows of two days or more between booked dates. Each finding states the values that triggered it so the judgement stays yours.

Your data, and where it lives

The tour is saved in this browser's local storage and nowhere else. It is not transmitted to Live Index, not written to a database and not used in any published Live Index figure. Clearing site data deletes it, which is why export exists.

Export writes a versioned JSON document identified as live-index-tour/v1, containing the tour setup, the tour-wide assumptions and every stop with its entered values. Import reads that schema and refuses anything else with a plain message rather than attempting a silent migration; unrecognised statuses and non-numeric values are normalised instead of crashing the workspace. CSV export writes the itinerary one row per stop, with empty cells where a value was never entered. Calendar export writes an all-day entry for each dated stop.

Sharing a routing publicly — putting an open date in front of promoters, or a routing gap in front of venues — is the obvious next step and is not built. The control for it is visible and disabled, because a disabled control is honest and a coming-soon page is not.

The research behind the model

The definitions used here follow the ones Live Index publishes in its touring economics work: what a guarantee is, how a versus deal settles, and why gross revenue and artist profit are different quantities.

• How Many Tickets Does an Artist Need to Sell to Make a Tour Work?
• Guarantees, Door Deals and Percentage Deals
• Why Gross Revenue Tells You Almost Nothing About Artist Profit
• Touring Cost Inflation: Labor, Fuel, Hotels and Production
• The Touring Middle Is Getting Crushed
• The Independent Promoter Margin Problem
• Touring economics: why the middle of the market gets squeezed
• Independent promoter economics: margins, risk and scale
• National indicators