MasterTour is the tour management software that the professional touring world runs on. Tour managers, production managers, artists, crew members, and booking agents who are managing multi-week or multi-month tours use it to coordinate the logistics that make a tour function. It is the industry standard for this specific job, and it has been for years.
Understanding what MasterTour does — and what it doesn't do — is useful for any artist whose touring operation has grown beyond what a shared Google Sheet can handle.
What MasterTour Actually Is
MasterTour is a product by Eventric, a company built specifically for the touring industry. The platform exists in two forms: the Desktop (web portal) at $49.99/month, managed by the tour manager or management team, and the Mobile app (free, read-only for most crew members) that gives everyone on the road access to the information they need from their phone.
The core of what MasterTour manages:
Itinerary. The complete day-by-day schedule for every person on the tour: departure times, hotel addresses, soundcheck times, show times, curfew times. The itinerary is the operational Bible for a touring party. When it's in MasterTour, it's one document that the whole team accesses and that updates in real time when logistics change.
Contacts. Every venue contact, promoter, hotel, transportation company, and crew member in one place. When you're in a new city every day, having the production manager's number and the venue's loading dock hours in one searchable system is the difference between a smooth day and a search through six email threads.
Hotel blocks. Room assignments for the entire touring party. Who's in what room, which rooms are being comped by the promoter, which rooms are being paid by the production account.
Guest list. Every artist's guest list in one system. When the venue door person asks who's on the list, there's one source of truth rather than four different lists on four different people's phones.
Set list. Live set list management, including key changes, backing track cues, and notes for the production team.
Crew sheets. Contact information and role descriptions for every person on the tour, distributed to venues and promoters in advance.
Who Uses It
MasterTour is built for the road, which means it's designed for the scale at which tour logistics get genuinely complex. Artists touring with a full band, a production crew, a tour manager, and advancing shows in multiple markets several weeks ahead are the primary users. The platform also has a social layer — "Touring Tags" — where artists and crew log recommendations for everything from guitar techs to coffee shops in cities they visit regularly.
For a solo artist doing a regional run of five dates with no crew beyond a driver, MasterTour is more infrastructure than the operation requires. For a 30-date North American tour with five crew members and a bus, it's the right tool for the job.
MasterTour and BCKSTG
MasterTour handles the internal operations of a tour — the logistics that the team needs to make the shows work. BCKSTG handles the public-facing side — the tour dates that fans see, the ticket links they click, the fan page that tells them when you're in their city.
When these two systems connect, tour dates entered in MasterTour sync to a BCKSTG fan page without manual re-entry. The tour manager inputs everything once, into the system the team uses operationally, and fans see the result on the artist's public page.
This is how the integration is designed: MasterTour is not replaced by BCKSTG, and BCKSTG is not a substitute for MasterTour. They answer different questions for different audiences — the team versus the fans — using the same underlying tour data.
Getting Set Up
Artists who are not yet at the scale where MasterTour is necessary can manage their public tour dates through BCKSTG directly — manual entry, CSV import, or the Ticketmaster/Eventbrite sync covers the public-facing need without the internal tour management layer.
When your operation grows to the point where the team's logistical coordination is the bottleneck, MasterTour earns its cost quickly. A single miscommunication between a tour manager, a production manager, and a venue advance team is worth more than $49.99 in time and stress to resolve on the road.
When MasterTour Becomes Necessary
The threshold for needing MasterTour isn't a specific number of shows — it's a specific level of operational complexity.
Signs you need MasterTour:
You have a tour manager. If someone other than you is responsible for coordinating logistics, they need a centralized system that the whole team accesses. WhatsApp groups and shared spreadsheets work until they don't, and the moment they don't tends to be the most stressful point of a tour.
You're advancing shows multiple weeks ahead. Show advance — the process of confirming all production details with the venue before arrival — for 30+ dates can't be tracked in email threads. MasterTour's contact management and itinerary integration are designed for this.
Crew sheets need to go to venues in advance. Major venues and festivals require crew lists, vehicle information, and hospitality riders submitted 7–14 days before the show. Generating these from a centralized system rather than rebuilding them per show is the difference between hours of work and minutes.
Multiple people need real-time access to itinerary. When your driver needs to know the venue load-in time, your tour manager needs to confirm hotel check-in, and your guitarist needs the soundcheck time — all simultaneously, all from their phones, in a city they've never been to — MasterTour Mobile is the answer.
What MasterTour Doesn't Do
MasterTour manages tour operations, not fan-facing communication. It doesn't:
- Display tour dates publicly
- Capture fan emails
- Process ticket sales
- Manage your social media or marketing
- Handle merchandise inventory
- Process invoicing or accounting
For each of these functions, you need separate tools. The integration between MasterTour and BCKSTG handles the public-facing tour date layer; merch and ticketing run through their own platforms; accounting runs through QuickBooks, Xero, or whatever your bookkeeper uses.
This is the correct separation of concerns. A single platform that tried to handle internal tour ops AND public fan presence AND ticketing AND accounting would do all four poorly. MasterTour does its one job exceptionally well.
Alternatives to MasterTour
For artists who don't need MasterTour's full feature set, alternatives exist:
Master Tour Manager (no relation to MasterTour). A simpler tour management tool at a lower price point.
Tour-specific Google Sheets templates. For touring at the early stage, a well-structured shared spreadsheet works. Multiple templates exist online specifically for music tours.
Notion or Airtable. Custom databases can replicate parts of MasterTour's functionality. Requires setup effort but offers flexibility.
The trade-off in all alternatives: less mature, less industry-standard, smaller community of users who can help when something goes wrong. MasterTour's value is partly in being what the industry expects — venue advance teams, festival production coordinators, and tour managers are all familiar with it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is MasterTour worth $49.99/month for a small touring act?
For a solo artist doing five regional dates with a driver, no. For a band touring with five people in a van across 20 dates, the time saved on logistics typically justifies the cost in the first week. The break-even calculation: if MasterTour saves the tour manager three hours per week of administrative work, at any reasonable hourly value the math is favorable.
Can I use MasterTour without a tour manager?
Yes. Many self-managed artists use MasterTour to organize their own operations. The benefit is the same — centralized itinerary, contacts, and guest list — even when the artist is the person inputting and managing the data.
How does MasterTour data sync to BCKSTG?
Tour dates entered in MasterTour can be pulled by BCKSTG's integration to populate the public fan page automatically. The internal MasterTour data (itineraries, crew sheets, hospitality riders) stays in MasterTour — only the public-facing dates sync over. This means you enter tour dates once in your operational system and they appear on your fan page without duplicate entry.
Are there alternatives for international touring?
MasterTour is widely used internationally — the platform works for tours in any country. For tours running on country-specific operational systems (UK production schedules, European festival circuits), MasterTour integrates with most of the standard tools touring acts use globally.
The Hidden Operational Cost MasterTour Eliminates
The most underestimated cost in touring without proper logistics software isn't time spent organizing data — it's the cost of errors that result from disorganized data.
Specific failure modes:
Missed soundchecks. A guitarist arrives at 4pm thinking soundcheck is at 5pm. It was at 3pm. The venue's house engineer is already done. The band performs without a proper soundcheck. The show suffers.
Wrong hotel. The driver delivers half the band to the hotel that was the previous night's destination because no one had the current night's address easily accessible. Two hours lost.
Guest list disputes. A guest arrives at the venue door expecting to be on the list. The door staff has a list with no entry. The guest is turned away. The artist's relationship with that guest is damaged. The artist might not even know it happened until weeks later.
Lost crew sheets. The venue requires crew names and contact information 7 days in advance. The tour manager sends them. The venue claims they never received them. Without a centralized record of when and where the crew sheet was sent, the dispute has no resolution.
Each of these failures is recoverable but costly. MasterTour doesn't prevent them — humans still make errors — but it makes the source of truth unambiguous when errors are caught. The cost of a single tour where these failures compound is significantly more than the annual MasterTour subscription.
Mobile vs Desktop: Real Use Cases
The MasterTour Desktop is where data lives and gets updated. The MasterTour Mobile is where the touring party accesses it. Both matter; they serve different roles:
Desktop (tour manager). Daily updates, advance work, post-show notes, hotel block management.
Mobile (crew, artists, vendors). Real-time access to today's schedule, contact lookups, guest list verification at the door, room assignment confirmation.
The integration matters. A platform that didn't have strong mobile access would force the tour manager to relay every question, which is the failure mode that makes shared spreadsheets break down on tour. MasterTour Mobile being read-only for most crew members is a feature, not a limitation — it prevents accidental edits to data the touring party shouldn't be modifying mid-tour.