The Promoter's Playbook: Mastering the Live Music Industry

By Philip Stengel

Promote smarter, not louder.
Build shows that sell, settle clean, and scale.

The Promoter's Playbook is a field manual for concert promotion, written for people who want repeatable results, clean accounting, and leverage that lasts longer than a single night. It breaks promotion into real operations: show math, holds, contracts, marketing cadence, ticketing, staffing, settlement, and post-show retention.

This is not theory. It is a step-by-step system built around the constraints promoters actually face: thin margins, flaky partners, last-minute surprises, and the reality that most "marketing advice" ignores the deal terms that decide whether you win or lose.

Inside you'll build a working promotion workflow that covers:

Offer structure, holds, and deal terms that protect your downside

Budgets, break-evens, and pricing strategy you can run in minutes

Marketing timelines and content cadence that match ticket velocity

Ticketing strategy, ad spend discipline, and attribution basics

Settlement, payroll, reporting, and reconciliations that keep you safe

Crisis handling for cancellations, underperformance, and disputes

Scaling from one-off shows to repeat routes and annual anchors

If you want a clean framework that tells you what to do, when to do it, and how to measure it, this is the playbook.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DZ26XG5P
• ISBN13: 9798312598056
• Release Date: March 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"