Touring terms

Bus call

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Bus call is the time the tour bus departs, and the one time on the day sheet with no grace period. Crew who miss bus call find their own way to the next city, a rule enforced precisely because everyone knows it.

All access (AAA)

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All access is the credential tier that opens every area of a show site: stage, dressing rooms, production offices. AAA laminates are issued sparingly and checked constantly; most working passes restrict at least one zone.

Laminate

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A laminate is the durable tour credential issued for a whole tour or season, as opposed to single-day stick-on passes. The hierarchy of laminates and stickers encodes who belongs where, readable at a glance by security.

Runner

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A runner is the local crew member with a vehicle who handles errands on show day: airport pickups, emergency purchases, catering runs. A good runner with local knowledge routinely saves shows in ways no plan anticipates.

Radius clause

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A radius clause is a contract term preventing an artist from playing another show within a defined distance and time window of the contracted date, protecting the promoter’s ticket sales from the artist competing with themselves.

Hold (venue hold)

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A hold is a tentative reservation of a venue date. Holds stack in order (first hold, second hold); a challenge forces the earlier hold to confirm or release. Routing lives and dies in the holds ledger.

Offer sheet

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An offer sheet is the promoter’s formal bid for a show: date, venue, guarantee and deal structure, ticket scaling, and expense assumptions. Accepted offers become contracts; their assumptions become settlement math.

Four-wall

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To four-wall a venue is to rent the room itself (the four walls) and bring in everything else: production, staffing, ticketing, and risk. The renter acts as their own promoter, keeping upside and absorbing losses.

Ancillaries

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Ancillaries are venue revenue streams beyond the ticket: parking, concessions, merchandise fees, facility charges. Deal negotiations increasingly touch ancillaries because that is where modern venue economics live.

Merch rate

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The merch rate is the percentage of merchandise sales a venue or its concessionaire keeps in exchange for selling space and staff. Artists track it closely because merchandise is high-margin income the rate directly erodes.

Support

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Support is the opening act. Support slots come with constrained production: a slice of the stage, a subset of the PA, limited soundcheck (or line check only), all negotiated in the advance between the two camps.

Shed

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A shed is an amphitheater, typically an outdoor venue with a covered stage and lawn seating, on North American summer touring circuits. "Shed season" is the summer amphitheater run.

Yellow card (IATSE)

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A yellow card show is a touring production formally recognized by IATSE, carrying union crew under the union’s touring agreement and picking up local union labor per the card’s terms in each city.

Routing

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Routing is the sequence and geography of tour dates: which cities, in which order, with what drives between them. Good routing minimizes deadhead miles and impossible overnight jumps; bad routing shows up as exhausted crews and missed load-ins.

Fly date

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A fly date is a show the touring party reaches by air rather than by the bus-and-truck routing, usually with rented local production and backline. Festival slots dropped into a tour are the classic case.

Site visit

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A site visit is the pre-production walkthrough of a venue or event site: verifying dimensions, power, rigging, access, and logistics before plans are finalized. Corporate production leans on site visits the way touring leans on the advance.

Part of the eventools.io Show Dictionary, a free glossary of live event production terminology.