Put on a gig, start to finish

Capacity sets every other number, so decide it first and decide it honestly. The instinct is to book for the night you are hoping for. The better instinct is to book for the draw you can actually evidence: how many came last time, how many this artist pulls in this city specifically, and how many of those will travel on a wet Tuesday in February.

A full 120-capacity room and a half-empty 300 hold the same audience, but they are not the same night. The full one sells out, which is a story worth telling. The artist plays to a packed floor, which is why they come back. And you are not paying hire on space nobody stood in. Undersizing slightly is a recoverable mistake. Oversizing is the one that ends promoters.

Past the number itself, check what the room actually gives you: the licensed capacity rather than the advertised one, the curfew, whether there is an in-house PA and engineer or you are hiring both, sound restrictions that might rule the act out entirely, and what the hire fee covers. Venue listings on CIRCUIT carry capacity and venue type, and hire enquiries go out with your event details already attached, so most of that is settled before anyone picks up a phone.

Work backwards from what the night costs you, not forwards from a number that sounds about right.

Add up the artist fee, the venue hire, sound and lighting if they are not included, and whatever you are spending to promote it. That total is your floor. Divide it by the attendance you genuinely expect - not the capacity, the expectation - and you have your break-even ticket price. Everything above it is margin. Everything below it, you are funding the show yourself.

The most common error is dividing by capacity. A room that holds 200 does not mean 200 people, and pricing as though it does turns a plan that looks sold out on paper into a loss at two thirds full.

Tiers earn their keep as information as much as revenue. A small early-bird allocation priced below the standard tells you within days whether demand is there, which is while there is still time to do something about it. If they go in a week, push harder. If they sit, you have found out early rather than on the night.

Comps and guest list are worth deciding deliberately rather than handing out as the date approaches. On CIRCUIT both are tracked - comps are real scannable tickets and guest entries carry party sizes - so the box office number is the number actually in the room, not the number you sold.

Promoting is a margin business, and the margin is usually eaten in places nobody quotes you up front. So here is the whole of it.

On ticket sales CIRCUIT takes nothing from you. Price a ticket at £10 and £10 reaches your account. The booking fee is paid by the fan at checkout, at 6% + 30p, which is about 99p on a typical grassroots ticket and less than Eventbrite or Skiddle charge. Card processing is included in it, so there is no separate Stripe line to find later.

Booking payments work the other way round, because there is no fan in the room to carry it: when you settle an artist fee through escrow, the platform fee is 12% on Free and 8% on PRO, deducted before the money is released. That is below what a booking agency charges for the same introduction, and unlike an agency we hold the fee in escrow until after the show.

Standalone invoices you raise outside CIRCUIT's payment flow carry no platform fee at all. If you settle a booking privately, the platform takes nothing from it.

The artist fee is held in escrow from the moment a booking is confirmed and releases automatically 48 hours after the event. This is the part that tends to matter most to the acts you are trying to book. Late payment is a well-documented problem in grassroots live music, and being able to show that the fee is already committed is a straightforward way to be easy to say yes to.

If a flat fee is not the right shape for the night, you can agree a revenue split with the artist instead. The platform calculates and settles it, which removes the conversation where two people compare arithmetic at 1am. Splits run between promoter and artist; a venue hire stays its own arrangement rather than a third slice of the same pie.