I built a website to help artists book their tour
Steve Hofstetter
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I built a website to help artists book their tour<br>Tourcery.com could be a game-changer for indie artists
Steve Hofstetter<br>Jul 12, 2026
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If you follow me, you know I’ve never had much of a taste for the rules of the industry. Today, I’m happy to announce other comedians, musicians, and live performers don’t have to either.
Promoters who sell tickets, agents who secure you unique venues, and bookers who are experts at routing are worthwhile. But so many promoters don’t promote. So many agents take calls instead of making them. And so many bookers don’t care if you drive eight hours between gigs because they’re not the ones doing it.
When I fired my agent for signing Kanye, I took it upon myself to book my tour. In the process, I found out just how many venues are happy to deal directly with artists. I began helping book for friends, like Sammy Obeid, Lisandra Vasquez, Cliff Cash, Stormy Daniels, and more. I hired my wife to run my tour. We hired Bailey Ervin to expand booking further. And then, I built a website that could make it all much easier.
In the process, I created a database of almost 300,000 venues around the world and a system that could help any live act book their own tour. Today, I am making it public.
I present Tourcery, which does four main things:
1) Tourcery is the world’s largest directory of venues that have live entertainment. By connecting to Google Maps, Yelp, and several other directories, we constantly remove closed venues, add new ones, and get updated contact information.<br>Some are giant arenas, some are teeny cafes. Some may even be pizza places that had a singer one time and who will tell you that it was a horrible idea. But the site allows you to filter by size, location, name, cost per seat, and a dozen other categories. Tourcery also allows users to message venues directly, export their search results, and more.<br>2) Routing can be difficult, so Tourcery makes suggestions for you. You can list your tour dates, and the site suggests cities within striking distance of your route. Are you looking for a stop half-way between two places or closer to one of them? Do you want to avoid anything with a certain distance of existing stops? Are you only looking for metro areas of a specific size? It’s all filterable and connects to the venue directory.<br>3) No one knows enough about global population to know everywhere they should perform. If you enter your tour into the route planner, Tourcery lets you know where you’re missing. You can limit it to certain countries, states, provinces, or regions. You can tell it you only want large cities or rural areas. You can filter by population and within a certain amount of mileage. And the site will help you find the best possible areas to add – and provide you with the venues in those areas.
4) Keeping track of your calendar is important. Not only can the site handle that, it also looks at major ticketing websites to see some of what else is on the calendar for a certain area. Do you want to see what your competition is? Knowledge is power, and Tourcery provides it.
The site is built with a combination of software, APIs, vibe, and good old-fashioned hand-coding. I have been a hobby programmer since I was 15. I knew being a lonely nerd in high school would come in handy someday.
The site has a free version that lets you use some of the tools (like the route planner) and a few levels of paid that allow different limits on how many venues come up in a search and how many you can contact, etc. A pro account starts at just $9 a month, so if you use it to book one gig a year, it will more than pay for itself. If you use it to book your whole tour, well, you’ll save a fortune. And if you’re one of the good promoters, agents, or bookers, you can use it, too.
Please share this with any artist communities you know and tag your performer friends in the comments. Thank you for reading, and long live the independent artist.
The site is Tourcery.com. And if you find any bugs or have ideas to make it even cooler, please let me know.
My upcoming tour dates:
Tickets at SteveHofstetter.com
7/13/26 Indianapolis<br>7/15/26 Nashville<br>7/16/26 Chattanooga<br>7/22/26 Birmingham<br>7/23/26 Liverpool<br>7/25/26 London<br>8/9/26 Raleigh<br>8/11/26 Digital<br>8/14/26 Carolina Beach<br>8/23/26 Charlotte<br>8/28/26 Asheville<br>9/6/26 Knoxville<br>9/6/26 Louisville<br>9/7/26 St. Louis<br>9/8/26 Columbia<br>9/9/26 Kansas City<br>9/10/26 Kearney<br>9/13/26 Denver<br>9/13/26 Fort Collins<br>9/14/26 Colorado Springs<br>9/16/26 Grand Junction<br>9/16/26 Salt Lake City<br>9/17/26 Boise<br>9/18/26 Bend<br>9/19/26 Portland<br>9/20/26 Tacoma<br>9/22/26 Bellingham<br>9/24/26 Vancouver<br>9/25/26 Bremerton<br>9/26/26 Seattle<br>9/27/26 Spokane<br>9/28/26 Missoula<br>9/29/26 Bozeman<br>9/30/26 Billings<br>10/2/26 Rapid City<br>10/4/26 Sioux City<br>10/4/26 Lincoln<br>10/5/26 Wichita<br>10/6/26 Oklahoma City<br>10/7/26 Tulsa<br>10/9/26 Little Rock<br>10/10/26 Tuscaloosa<br>10/11/26 Alpharetta<br>10/23/26...