Most show-day chaos isn’t caused by surprises. It’s caused by the same handful of things every time, the things everyone assumed someone else was handling. Here’s the version we wish every venue would tape to the office door.
Run through this 90 minutes before doors. It takes about twenty minutes if nothing’s wrong, and it’s the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy.
Tickets and entry
- Confirm the door staff have the final guest list ? printed and on a phone, in case the printout walks off
- Test one ticket scan end-to-end on each entry lane
- Confirm who has the authority to comp someone in if a scanner fails
- Decide in advance how late you’ll let people in (and tell the artist)
Artist and crew
- Confirm the green room has water, the rider’s done, and someone knows where the towels are
- Confirm soundcheck is actually finished, not just “almost done”
- Settle the night-of payment process before the show, not after
House and front-of-house
- Test every payment terminal ? bar, merch table, coat check
- Confirm at least one person on staff knows how to reset the WiFi if the card readers go down
- Walk the room and check sightlines from the worst seat in the house
- Confirm the house lights and stage lights have actually been programmed for tonight, not last night
After the show
- Decide who’s writing the settlement before anyone goes home
That last one isn’t pre-show, but it’s where most disputes start. The pre-show checklist is also the moment to remember it exists.
What this list isn’t
This is twenty minutes of insurance, not a substitute for actual production planning. If you’re running a 3,000-cap room with multiple stages, you need real run-of-show docs, not a Markdown file. But for the 200?800 cap rooms where most live music actually happens, this catches 80% of what goes wrong.
If your venue has its own version of this ? better, longer, weirder ? we’d love to see it. Send it to us; we’ll write up the best ones.