Concerts are one of those events where you can unabashedly bawl your eyes out. Irrespective of the presence of a swarm of sweaty bodies and loud, unharmonious and inaccurate singing, concerts make you feel at home with the music. Just the feeling of seeing your favourite icon in person is such an overwhelming experience, hearing the notes bounce off the microphone with the only medium being air and not an average quality video with distorted sound playing on the screen of some electronic device. People from different walks of life vibing together, de-stressing from their physically and mentally demanding lives makes it a haven safe from the clutches of reality. But most of us go to reel in the feeling of the magic happening on stage, little do we think of the amount of work that goes on backstage where a crew of thousand slog their overworked minds off unless someone has a keen interest in production systems and has procured knowledge of the different parameters encompassing it.
Right from the green rooms to the heavily equipped sound systems, it takes a village to pull off the production of a single concert.
Management team:
The artist’s management team coordinates their overall growth across the music industry, including the concerts, serving as an essential bridge between their live performances and other music-related aspects. From mapping out the initial route to helping the artist select the touring team, their presence is of crucial importance.
Then come booking agents who are responsible for selling the shows to local talent buyers, scouting the right venues, negotiating all the deals, ensuring the concert tickets get sold out at the correct rates with both the artists and promoters feeling content.
Promoters:
Any concert would be incomplete without a middleman connecting the ideal concert environment to the artist’s team. They are either a part of the main crew or representatives of the concert environment itself. Tour promoters are part of the artist’s crew who deal with things such as roping in musicians to perform gigs, managing accounts for rehearsals as well as travel expenses, audiovisual production and assisting the booking agent in renting out venues or subcontracting shows to the local promoters.
The local promoters are connected to the concert venues, they buy shows from agents or the tour promoters and handle ticket sales. Agents form the intermediate contact between promoters and artists themselves. Big-time entertainment companies under whom several artists are signed such as Live Nation and AEG have consolidated the two under one banner. Together they produce concert tours and secure partnerships with significant clubs to capture venues along with owning a few venues and managing the careers of music artists. These event management companies now control the majority of music-related aspects of a concert right from marketing and advertising to producing and promoting tours, artist’s management and ticket sales.
Sponsors:
An imperative source of gathering funds to provide a smooth running concert are sponsors. A highly active and engaging social media presence ensures greater credibility to establish the artists on a sponsor’s radar. By gaining the right sponsorship from the concerning companies results in the acquisition of profits on both sides. In exchange for support and aid, sponsors get featured across all platforms of a concert . Major festivals like Coachella, where a large audience gathers results in an ideal scenario for companies to spread brand awareness. Most common are alcohol, staging, sound companies, hotel chains and the list goes on. Bacardi, a well-known alcohol brand, promotes its name through sponsoring many events, most popularly the NH7 weekender event where its name is prefixed before the event name. Levis, a famous clothing brand instead of sponsoring organised its event in Mumbai with over 50 artists performing who spoke about their choice of Levis clothing for the event and then performed live to a 2000+ audience.
Tour managers and technicians:
The main crew consists of sound engineers, a lighting technician, tour manager and instrument technicians who travel with the artists while touring. The tour managers deal with the business-related aspect of the tours, while the rest of the crew is responsible for putting up the sets and other gear for the main performances. The sound engineer is in charge of mixing the audio that the audience hears using some sort of mixing console. The Front of House engineer controls what the audience hears during a concert. He is in charge of all the audio equipment, ensuring optimum sound quality. He oversees the duties of the other sound engineers and technicians. This is crucial because what the audience generally wants to hear is different from what the performers want to hear. The audience wants to listen to a mixed balance of all the instruments, whereas the performer may wish to focus only on the chords strumming out of their guitar. He uses some type of splitting system that splits up incoming sound signals electrically or digitally.
Most of the large scale concerts with significant artists performing include monitor engineers who handle the mixing console and ensure each musician can hear everything they need to perform. Monitor engineering in recent times has accelerated towards wireless technology with artists using in-ear headphones with wireless belt packs enabling free movement around the stage without being held back by long guitar cables. In the earlier times, bands like the Beatles faced troubles in their initial concerts such as at Shea stadium performing up to their set standards due to poor sound monitoring. Their voices were drowned out by the audience, and their vocals were channelled through the stadium’s own PA systems.
Concert lighting too has evolved over time. With old gigs containing individual white lights hung from the ceiling with coloured plastic filters to produce the desired colour to the LED lights now used whose movements can now be controlled, lighting has been a game-changer in the world of concerts.
With the demands of sponsors, the artists and the audience, not to forget the public backlash for one minuscule miscalculation on their part, the production of a concert is a tedious task. For them too as it is with the artists and audience, music stands as a mighty armour to cope with depression and other illnesses.
So powerful are its outreaching benefits, that they have since been used by many organisations to raise awareness and funds for various social and global causes. One such unforgettable event was the 1885 Live aid; a dual-venue, 16 hours live music concert held both in London and Philadelphia simultaneously. Although famous as the last concert of Freddie Mercury this event had a lineup of the most iconic bands and musicians like U2, David Bowie, Bryan Adams and many more and raised around $127 million for famine relief in Africa. Another prominent one was the One Love Manchester concert organised By Ariana Grande along with other artists to support victims of the Manchester terror attack. Or lesser-known ones like the concert for Bangladesh in 1971 which was held in New York to raise money for east Pakistani refugees. This only proves that the universal language of music bridges all barriers, irrespective of time, distance, ethnicity, orientation and gender. More than a language it is a healer, a feeling, an emotion that not only connects different minds but bonds them too, giving them home between each note and a voice amidst the chaos.
Written by Crew Member Shrijani
Artwork by Crew Member Sangeet Pandey
Chords & Co. 