For decades, booking a concert tour has been one of the music business’ most opaque processes — a craft built on personal relationships, instinct, reputation and thousands of emails that never lead anywhere. Now, as touring grows more expensive and artists are increasingly forced to operate like small businesses, artificial intelligence is being asked to step in.
The question facing the live music world isn’t whether AI can help book concerts. It’s whether it can do so without flattening a system that depends as much on trust and taste as it does on data.
That tension sits at the heart of Music Mogul AI, a new software platform created by veteran booking agent Brad Stewart of Stewart Entertainment in Charlotte, N.C. Designed to automate large portions of the touring process — from identifying venues and emailing promoters to negotiating fees, advancing shows and marketing concerts — Music Mogul AI is among the most direct attempts yet to apply artificial intelligence to one of music’s most relationship-driven jobs.
Supporters see it as a potentially democratizing tool for independent artists locked out of traditional representation. Critics worry it risks turning a deeply human business into another stream of automated emails — at a moment when inboxes are already overwhelmed.
“I didn’t build this because I think agents are obsolete,” Stewart says. “I built it because the system doesn’t work for a huge number of artists anymore.”
The touring squeeze
Stewart has spent more than 20 years booking tours, most recently as the founder of Stewart Entertainment Agency. Over that time, he’s watched touring costs climb steadily — gas, hotels, crew, insurance, production, venue staffing — while revenue opportunities for developing artists have narrowed.
“For an agency to take on an artist full time, they usually need to be grossing at least $200,000 a year in live revenue,” Stewart explains. “Below that, it’s really hard to justify the time.”
That economic reality leaves thousands of musicians in a gray zone: too established to book only locally, but not yet profitable enough to command sustained attention from a booking agency juggling dozens of clients. Many are left handling everything themselves — pitching venues, negotiating fees, promoting shows and advancing logistics — often without much guidance.
“They either burn out or they get dropped,” Stewart says. “And if you get dropped, you’re back to square one.”
Music Mogul AI is designed to fill that gap.
How Music Mogul AI works
The platform is built around three AI-driven modules Stewart calls “agents”: booking, marketing and management. Artists can subscribe to any combination of the three, though the booking agent is the foundation.
Artists begin by entering detailed information about their music, touring goals and financial expectations — weekday and weekend fees, minimum guarantees and preferred deal structures. The software then draws from Stewart’s proprietary database of venues, festivals and promoters, filtering options by genre, capacity and geography.
“You click on a city, set a radius — usually 350 miles — and it shows you the venues that make sense,” Stewart says.
From there, the system drafts outreach emails to talent buyers. Artists must approve every message before it’s sent. Follow-ups, counteroffers and negotiations are similarly prepared but never automated without human review.
“This isn’t blasting emails into the void,” Stewart says. “Nothing goes out without approval.”
Once a show is booked, Music Mogul AI generates a digital contract and a promotional poster at the same time, speeding up the announcement process. The marketing agent drafts and schedules social media posts, builds basic email newsletter copy and helps funnel fans toward ticket purchases and mailing lists.
The management agent functions like a virtual tour manager, advancing shows via email, collecting hospitality and production details and tracking post-show data such as ticket sales and merchandise revenue. That information feeds back into the system to inform future routing and pricing.
Stewart describes the platform as codifying best practices he’s relied on for decades — but at a scale and speed no individual agent could match.
“I’ve been doing all of this manually for 20 years,” he says. “This just does it faster and more consistently.”
A tool, not a replacement
Stewart is careful to frame Music Mogul AI as a supplement to human expertise, not a wholesale replacement.
“I tell people it’s like a nail gun,” he says. “You can still build a house with a hammer. This just helps you work faster.”
Emails sent through the platform come from Stewart Entertainment’s domain rather than a generic AI address, a deliberate choice meant to avoid spam filters and skepticism from promoters. Artists can even name their AI “agent,” reinforcing the third-party dynamic that often helps secure better offers.
Pricing is pitched as accessible: $300 per month per AI agent, or about $8,000 per year for the full suite — roughly the cost of a short public relations campaign.
“If it books you one show a month you didn’t have before, it pays for itself,” Stewart says.
“This is the keys to the castle that independent artists just don’t have,” says Bubba Startz, a South Dakota musical artist and podcaster who has been working with Stewart and learning to use Music Mogul AI to help book an upcoming tour.
“Most people aren’t even ready for a booking agent. They don’t have their ducks in a row. A large part of his onboarding process is preparing yourself to go on tour and thinking about transportation and marketing and building a budget,” Startz says. “It helps the artist understand the tour as much as it helps the booker understand the artist.”
Startz said he appreciates the platform’s “super clean, easy to use interface,” noting, “using the software reminds me of some of the early conversations I had with people about my act. Things like what style of gigs I liked to play, when I preferred to tour, and what my schedule looked like during the week versus the weekends.”
“I took all my information, along with my business plan, and fed it into the booking agent AI software,” Startz said. “It can take all of that information and compress it into email pitches to venue bookers. It’s going to save artists a ton of time booking shows and finding out ways to describe an artist’s act, and coming up with a blueprint for selling that artist to the right buyers.
“A lot of bands and artists have no idea how to talk to venue and club owners, or even get seen by the right people.. Music Mogul AI teaches you how to position yourself in the right way to actually get the gigs. This isn’t for weekend warriors; it’s a service for bands that are ready to get out on the road and stay out on the road.”
Fans watch a concert.
(CALIN STAN calinstan.com/Calin Stan – stock.adobe.com)
Why agents are wary
Still, automating booking strikes at the core of how the live music business operates.
Avery McTaggart, an agent at L.A.-based TBA Agency whose clients include Jungle, Big Thief, Remi Wolf and Ethel Cain, says the premise of an AI agent risks oversimplifying what booking agents actually do.
“Booking isn’t just logistics,” McTaggart says. “It’s long-term planning. It’s understanding how live shows fit into an artist’s release cycle, audience development and career trajectory.”
McTaggart sees real potential for AI in the administrative side of agency work — organizing offers, standardizing contracts, aggregating sales data. But automating outreach and negotiation raises concerns.
“There’s a huge amount of human communication in this job,” he says. “Reputation matters. Context matters. I don’t know that can be fully replicated by automation.”
He also worries about perception. In an era when inboxes are already flooded with AI-generated pitches, automated outreach risks becoming invisible — or worse, unwelcome.
“I worry about how a developing artist is being presented at a critical stage,” McTaggart says. “There’s value in someone picking up the phone and saying, ‘I believe in this artist.’”
From the promoter’s side
Those concerns are echoed by promoters who work closely with emerging artists.
Kyle Wilkerson, founder of Sid the Cat Presents, books shows for artists at every stage — including many with no agent, no manager and little online presence.
“Some of the artists I work with haven’t even released music online yet,” Wilkerson says. “I’m going off the quality of the music, not data.”
He estimates that roughly half the artists he works with represent themselves, often reaching out directly after meeting him at shows or sending demos.
“I don’t think AI can really help with that,” he says.
Wilkerson isn’t opposed to AI as an introductory tool — but only up to a point.
“If it’s just a way to contact me with the right information and I like the music, that’s fine,” he says. “But once we start talking about how a show actually feels — who it pairs well with, what the vibe is — that’s where AI stops and the human conversation starts.”
Where automation ends
At the heart of the debate is whether artistic careers can be guided by systems optimized for efficiency.
Career planning, both agents and promoters argue, isn’t simply a data problem. It involves taste, timing and trust — knowing when not to play a market, when to accept a smaller room, or when a support slot matters more than a headline date.
Stewart doesn’t deny those limits. In fact, he says they’re the reason Music Mogul AI includes optional consulting — one-on-one strategy sessions designed to complement the software.
“Technology builds the infrastructure,” he says. “Humans handle the relationships.”
Rear view of excited crowd enjoying a DJ performance at a festival. There are many raised hands, some of the holding cell phones and taping the show. People in foreground are released.
(gilaxia/Getty Images)
A test case for live music’s future
Music Mogul AI arrives as musicians are being asked to juggle creative work with marketing, logistics and data analysis — often without the safety net of a traditional team. For some, the platform may serve as a bridge between DIY touring and professional representation. For others, it may feel like one step too far toward automation in a business built on connection.
What seems inevitable is that AI will increasingly shape the back end of live music — streamlining workflows, reducing costs and organizing data. Whether it can replace the judgment calls that define great careers remains an open question.
As McTaggart puts it: “There’s enormous opportunity for AI in this space. I just don’t think removing the human entirely is the answer.”
For now, Music Mogul AI stands as a test case — not just of what technology can automate, but of how much of live music’s soul should be left to code.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
