Being a Concert Venue Manager.: What Should I Know

Career Final Paper

As I have grown older and ventured further in education I have grown a likeness for the music and entertainment business. I originally started out wanting to be involved in the front office as a general manager for a sports team but my plans have since changed. I want to go towards this business and I learned a lot and already know a lot about it.

For my job I decided to research being a Concert venue manager.

The thing I love about this job is how dedicated you truly have to be. This is not a job that you will work 9am-5pm from this is a job you will need to put in the extra effort and go the extra mile to get to where you need to be. For early concert venue managers when you start out at a smaller venue the yearly wage is around 35,000 dollars. As you progress into the bigger realm of things you can get up to 80,000 working at a bigger venue.

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(Hannan 1.) When wondering what goes into being a concert venue manager you need to realize it’s a lot of hard work.

Concert venue managers are the straw that stirs the drink when it comes to holding events at a venue. They are in charge of booking the event. Booking an event requires just more than calling up a band and saying you will pay them to play at your venue on a specific date. A lot goes into booking, first off you need to negotiate hiring fees, client fees, and promoting your show.

(Hannan 1.) Next you are going to want to make sure you have a set date because after all reputation and experience is a big part of the business and you will gain bad reputation for ‘double booking’ at your venue. It is just one of the many common etiquette type things you should learn or already know when having this job.

Overall you should realize just how stressful this job can ultimately be. After all working as a manager in any case can be a pain. People are relying on your skills to get work done. In this setting it can be even more stressful seeing on you have multiple things against you including public opinion, staff opinion, time, competition and necessary funds to complete a project. The big thing is knowing and realizing you don’t have a ton of help. As a concert venue manager you can hire staff and other employees to help but in the end you have to be independent with almost everything.

One of the great things about this job is the fact it is something that displays your rewards earlier than other jobs. You start to see the work put in and the reward taken out of it firsthand. The job qualifications needed depend on the place of employment. The standard educational requirement is a bachelor’s degree in personal relations and event management, preferably some experience with math, music, and business in high school and college. Internships help but are not a demand of your hiring employer. Outstanding communication skills, reading skills, and writing skills are heavily recommended for contracts, booking events over the phone and planning. Also needed are skills in budgeting, marketing, networking, managing and the big one negotiating. (Hannan 1.) Budgeting is a big factor because if you do not have money management experience it’s going to be hard to land the job when you have a hard time managing your own money let alone someone else’s. (Roennevig 1.) Advertising and promoting are key concepts of managing this type of business and you are going to need to be smart about how you target and who you target for certain shows. Location with advertising is also key because you need to attract attention to get people to see the advertising and remember to come down and see the show. (Roennevig 1.)

A concert venue manager can continue to progress all the way up to even a CEO of a big concert venue company. Considering this is a versatile position newly hired people can come from all sorts of backgrounds. It is most common to get theater stage crew and backstage managers to be promoted to a concert venue manager. At as early as you could getting an internship to even do lighting or assistant sound guy would give the person a major advantage in securing this type of job down the road. As far as the type of person to go after this type of job you want to make sure you know you are ready for anything. As a venue manager you need to realize how much responsibility you have in your hands and how many people are truly relying on you to increase sales and entertainment. Master negotiators would be the perfect type on one side of the job but you need someone who is an all-around worker. Someone who is the jack of all trades to really be successful in this area of work. It’s a package job meaning you are required to do more than a couple of things and will need to acquire more skills to really thrive in this field.

This job in the end is right up my alley and while it does have a limited number interested it’s still enough people to get by and you always know those type of people will do nothing but their absolute best to keep the venue running up to par. The exciting thing is you get to watch the bands you book as well and see the advertising you ordered all around the town. Being a concert venue manager is in general one of the best jobs for someone who loves music and loves to go to live music events. To be a part and basically give back to the fans the way the managers gave back to me and the fans back when I went to concerts is the best thing.