RUN ABAND
All help
All help

Seasons, trends and which acts draw

Your year month by month, what a normal night looks like, and which acts beat it.

Booking has more in it than open dates: time of year, what the crowd spends, what a normal night even looks like. Trends is where the room's own history answers those.

Two kinds of history, never added together

  • Settled nights — the evenings this app watched.
  • Monthly figures — a whole month as your accounting software records it, including everything that happened with nobody on stage.

The nights are a subset of the month, so adding them would count the same money twice. They are shown side by side instead, along with how much of each month this app actually saw. That coverage figure is useful in its own right.

Monthly figures exist so you are not starting from nothing. A room with two years of totals in its accounting software gets a trend line today instead of next year.

What you meant to spend

Set what you mean to spend on acts in a given month, and bookings count toward it as you make them. The useful part is the split between what you have paid and what you have promised: money committed to an act you have booked is gone as far as the next booking goes, but it hasn't left the account yet.

  • It covers act fees and the house tab, not staff or rent — the act fee is the number you actually choose, one booking at a time.
  • A night paying the act a share of the door has no cost until it is settled, so it is counted as unknown rather than as nothing.
  • The year totals only cover months you have budgeted. Spending in months you have not is shown separately.

Nobody else sees this — not bands, and not the agents who book for you. How much is left in your month is your negotiating position.

Season ratings

Rate each month of the year as you actually experience it. These are your judgement rather than a measurement, and they repeat every year. They are shown against what the room measurably drew precisely so the two can disagree — a month you call quiet that keeps drawing well is the finding.

What a normal night looks like

Mark the nights the room was open with nobody on stage. Those become the baseline, and they are what turn a no-cover crowd into something readable: some of those people came for the kitchen and would have come anyway, and the baseline is what separates them from the ones the act brought.

  • Baselines come only from nights with no live music. A quiet no-cover night still had an act on it.
  • Three such nights in a month before a baseline is drawn — one is a snowstorm, not a normal.
  • An act that emptied the room is reported as exactly that. It is the result you most need to see.
  • No baseline means no baseline. It never reads as “they added nothing” against somebody's name.

If your room is never dark

Plenty of rooms never have a night with nobody on stage — if the doors are open, something is playing. That is not a gap in your records and there is nothing to fix. Acts are still measured, against what your own room usually does that month rather than against an empty night, so an act who did exactly what the room normally does reads as exactly that.

The one thing a dark night adds is the figure in money: what an act was worth over simply opening the doors. That needs a night with nobody playing to compare against, so without one you get the comparison as a multiple instead — “drew 1.6× what this room usually does in March”. It is the same judgement in different units.

Never mark a night dark that had an act on it to get a baseline. It would delete that act's night from their record and drag the yardstick every other act is measured against toward a night that was never empty. The comparison against your own average needs nothing from you.

No-cover nights are also compared only against your other no-cover nights, never against your ticketed ones. The two draw differently, and measuring one against the other would mark down an act who did nothing wrong.

Which acts draw

Acts are ranked on what they did in your room: how full they got it, how consistently, how many tickets they sold themselves, and what the crowd spent. Each is measured against what your room normally does in the months they play — so pulling 55% in a January where you average 32% counts for more than 80% in a July where you average 78%.

  • Proven draw — they have repeatedly filled the room here.
  • Reliable — a solid average you can plan around.
  • Not enough nights yet — the room does not know, which is not the same as bad.

An act's yardstick leaves out their own nights. Otherwise an act who plays most of your Januaries would largely be compared against themselves and come out average by construction — hiding exactly the thing this is for.

What each night was worth

What the acts on a night cost you — their fees plus whatever they ran up on the house tab — against what the night took over a normal night that month. Both halves have been recorded all along and nothing ever put them side by side. It covers the last twelve months of settled nights, ranked in both directions.

The direction people expect is the expensive Saturday that did not draw. The one nothing else surfaces is the $250 act on a wet Tuesday who put $900 over a normal night, because that night felt unremarkable and cost too little to remember. Both lists are ranked, and the second is not a footnote to the first.

A night that took less than a night with nobody on stage says exactly that, in those words. Softening it to “returned little” would hide the one result worth reading twice.

  • A night with several acts is the bill's result and never any one act's. The crowd came for the whole thing and you paid for all of it.
  • A night paying a share of the door that has not been settled has no cost yet, so it is filed as unknown rather than as free. Counting it as nothing would make the figure most wrong on the nights that went best.
  • A month with no baseline has nothing to measure a night against, so those nights are unknown too.
  • Private hires are left out. The host's guests drink at the same bar, so there is no honest way to separate what the act caused from what the hire did.

Unknown nights get their own list rather than a place at the bottom of a ranking, and the totals only cover the nights where both halves are known. A night nobody can price yet and a night that returned nothing are different statements.

An act who played for free and drew a crowd gets no return-per-dollar figure. That is a real and good result, but it is not an infinite one, and dividing by nothing would print the most quotable wrong number on the page.

This is what you pay crossed with what you take, which is both sides of every negotiation you will ever have. It has no export, and nobody but you can see it.

Dates that behave differently

A season rating is about the month. A baseline is about an ordinary night in it. Neither can see that the 26th of December is not an ordinary December night, that the Saturday of a long weekend is not an ordinary Saturday, or that whatever your local festival weekend is does something to this room every year. On a calendar those are just dates, and they get given away at the standard fee in March.

So the same calendar date is collected across years and measured against a normal night that month. Both directions: a date that reliably empties the room is worth as much as one that fills it, and more if you have been staffing it like any other night.

  • Two years before it is called a pattern. A date comes round once a year, so asking for three would mean saying nothing about Boxing Night until your fourth Christmas.
  • A single year is still shown, labelled as one year, and it sits below every established pattern however dramatic it was. One good Boxing Night is a story, not a rule.
  • It has to sit about a quarter above or below normal before it is worth mentioning at all.

The same date lands on a different day of the week each year, and in a room whose Fridays and Tuesdays behave nothing alike that is most of the difference on a two-year sample. Where that has happened, the row says so. It is reported rather than corrected for — with two observations there is nothing honest to correct with.

Nights with nobody on stage are left out, because they are the yardstick and comparing one to itself would report every one as exactly normal. Private hires are left out for the reason they always are: the host paid for the room, so the take says nothing about the date.

How busy an act already is

When a band on RunABand asks for one of your dates, you can see how many other shows they have around it and how close the nearest one is. An act playing four rooms within twenty-five miles that month is a different proposition from one playing yours only.

You see counts and distances, never the name of the other room. That works both ways — your calendar is not disclosed to anybody either.