The Tour Trail Combines Gig Calendar & Ticket Sales

The Tour Trail is a recently launched service for musicians offering a combined calendar of upcoming dates with ticket sales where applicable. It's a free service designed for indie artists with a commission taken on ticket sales and no fees to fans.

The Tour Trail is simple and straightforward. Though it is free to use, there is a 10% fee for ticket sales plus a PayPal fee exacted when you get paid. Fans are charged only the ticket price and receive the ticket via email.

Currently the site offers individual band pages with an upcoming events calendar, a link to ticket sales powered by Vendini and customization options for band info and links to bandsites. You can check out some of the customized band pages via the homepage. Ryanhood has a nice example page.

They are planning to eventually offer domain mapping, so you could use it as a site or map it to a subdomain of your main site. Additional future features include integration with social media sites and accounts for live venues. I would suggest a band directory as well.

The only oddity I can find is that you have to contact them to cancel an event listing. They explain that cancelling event listings can confuse fans but since events can fall apart at the last minute, it would seem more confusing to have something up because they weren't available to cancel it in a timely manner. I would be surprised if this situation doesn't eventually change given the realities of touring.

Other than that and the fact that they don't identify themselves or offer a phone number on the site, The Tour Trail seems like a promising service for performing artists.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and blogs at All World Dance and This Business of Blogging. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.