Back On Stage vs. Master Tour: Advancing a Tour vs. Running a Band Business
The short answer
Master Tour is the industry standard for advancing and running a tour. If you have a routed run of dates, a bus, a crew and a production manager, it is very good at what it does and this page is not going to talk you out of it.
Back On Stage is built for a different business. Not a tour, but a calendar of one-off bookings that each have to be sold, priced, contracted, staffed, played and paid out. Weddings, corporate events, galas, casinos, private parties.
The difference is not a feature gap. It is a difference in what each tool assumes has already happened before you open it.
The assumption that separates them
Master Tour assumes the date already exists. Somebody booked it. The fee is agreed. The contract was handled by an agent or a manager weeks ago. Your job now is logistics: get the right people to the right building at the right time with the right gear, and make sure everyone has the day sheet.
That is a real and hard job, and Master Tour is built precisely for it. Day sheets, itineraries, guest lists, travel, personnel, venue records, offline access on the road.
For an event band, the date does not exist yet. That is the whole job.
An enquiry arrives from someone who also emailed three other bands. You reply fast or you lose it. You quote. You send a contract. You chase a signature. You take a deposit. Only then is there a date to organise, and afterwards there is an invoice to send, a balance to chase and eight or twelve people to pay at different rates.
None of that half of the work exists inside Master Tour, because touring acts have agents and managers who do it in a completely different system.
Side by side
| Job to be done | Master Tour | Back On Stage |
|---|---|---|
| Capture an inbound booking enquiry | No | Yes, lead forms feed the pipeline directly |
| Quote a client and hold a date | No | Yes |
| Generate a performance contract from the booking | No | Yes, pulls date, fee, times and venue from the booking |
| Collect an e-signature | No | Yes |
| Invoice the client and take a deposit | No | Yes |
| Chase an unpaid balance | No | Yes |
| Offer a date to a roster and let musicians accept | No, personnel is assigned rather than offered | Yes, Auto-Book and Shotgun Book |
| Flag a musician already committed elsewhere | No | Yes, conflict flags against existing bookings |
| Pay the band after the gig | No | Yes, per-musician payouts |
| Send gig details, dress code and call times to players | Yes, day sheets and itineraries | Yes, digital gig sheets |
| Setlists and charts for players | Limited | Yes |
| Multi-day routed tour with travel and hotels | Yes, this is its core strength | No |
| Guest lists and passes | Yes | No |
| Venue and production records across a tour | Yes | No |
| Offline access on the road | Yes | Limited |
| Run several band brands off one shared roster | No | Yes, multi-company with a single login |
Where Master Tour is straightforwardly better
Being honest about this makes the rest of the page worth reading.
Routing and travel. If your calendar is a sequence rather than a set of independent Saturdays, Master Tour handles the sequence. Drive times, hotels, flights, day-by-day itineraries for twenty people. Back On Stage does not model a routed tour at all.
Production and venue detail. Load-in times, dock access, power, local crew, historical venue records. Master Tour is the accumulated memory of a touring operation. That is not what we built.
Guest lists, passes and day-of-show operations. Entirely absent from Back On Stage.
Offline reliability. Master Tour is built for people in a metal building with no signal. Our players are usually in a hotel ballroom with wifi, so we have never had to solve that problem as hard.
If you are a tour manager, use Master Tour. We are not the right tool and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
Pricing
Master Tour does not publish its pricing on its own website. Third-party software directories list it in the region of $65 to $75 per user per month, but that figure does not come from Eventric and we are not going to present an estimate as a fact. If you want a real number you will need to ask them.
The structural point matters more than the number: Master Tour is priced per user. On a touring operation with a manager, a production manager and a few crew, that is a handful of seats and it is fine.
Back On Stage is priced per admin seat, and musicians are free. Starter is $19/month, Pro is $40/month and Agency is $63/month, all billed annually. Additional admin seats are $10 each, or $8 on Agency. Every musician and crew member on your roster is free and unlimited on every plan, because a fourteen-piece with a forty-person sub list should not cost fourteen times what a quartet costs.
Pricing checked August 2026. If either has changed, tell us and we will correct this page.
Can you run both?
Yes, and a few acts genuinely should.
If you run a wedding and corporate band at home and also take a version of it out on routed runs, the two tools do not overlap much. Back On Stage handles the enquiry, the contract, the staffing and the money. Master Tour handles the road.
The overlap is gig details, and that is the only place you would be entering something twice.
The one-line version
Master Tour runs a tour that somebody else already sold. Back On Stage runs the selling, the signing, the staffing and the paying, for a business made of one-off dates.
If your problem is getting twenty people across three countries in nine days, they have it covered. If your problem is that an enquiry sat unanswered for two days, a date is blocked out with nothing signed behind it, and it is 1am and you are still working out who is owed what, that is the problem we built for.
What our users say
"I feel like I have a full time secretary and record keeper."
Greg Bella, Bella's Second Shot
That is the business half, not the road half, and it is the half Master Tour was never trying to solve.
