TourIntel Offers Free Look At Live Show Data

TourIntel offers "Concert Business Intelligence" and accounts are currently free for a limited time. TourIntel claims to provide data on over 15,000 artists performing at over 7500 venues for more than 10 years of history. Such data offers a potentially powerful tool to gain a sense of trends over time, as well as to evaluate how specific acts and venues are doing.

TourIntel is a joint production of ArtistForce.com and CelebrityAccess. The site's data is "confidential and proprietary" so I'll describe what they offer without sharing specifics about artists.

The artist profiles contain a basic chart with such information as average concert gross, attendance and ticket price in quickly graspable charts. Info on individual shows is then available in a long list of entries. The graphics are pleasing and easy to consume.

Artists can be compared via a graph of basic data and an even longer list of individual shows that was a bit difficult to take in.  It seemed like they were missing some shows so I checked out David Bowie and compared what was offered to a Wikipedia entry on his tours and found that he definitely performed more than TourIntel includes. However, to really gauge how complete their database is would take quite a bit of work.

The charts for particular venues include such valuable information as marketshare in the particular city and metrics for particular genres as well as a history of individual shows.

The most useful tool appears to be the Advanced Search option offering Artist or Venue. It gives one a better sense of what the database contains including some data all the way back to the 1920s and, in addition to artists in various music genres, one finds that comedians, variety show performers and public speakers are included. Artists can also be searched by such critieria as concert gross and attendance range.

The Advanced Venue Search includes a variety of facilities from Ampitheaters to Atriums and an international selection. Of course, it's diverse terrain and some data is limited or nonexistent but the range of options offers some interesting possibilities. However, the Venue search offered data only going back three years.

I found myself wishing for a clearer list of what was available and had to keep going back to the homepage to examine my options separately from the dashboard. So initial use does have an awkward element until one gets to know the service.  I also found myself wishing they had links to news coverage of events which seems like a reasonable and smart thing to add to enrich the service.

TourIntel is definitely worth a look while it's available for free. Whether or not it meets your needs will obviously depend on the exact nature of those needs but it's certainly easy to use and the data is presented in a manner that's readily understandable.

Note: I was alerted to TourIntel's offering of free services by an ad on Hypebot. However, I'm writing about them because they seem worth reviewing, not because they placed an ad.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance is his primary web project.