My friend Mak Wai Hoo has been organizing concerts in Southeast Asia for years — he knows the circuit. When we talked recently, he made a point that’s been rattling around in my head since: the established bands are being pushed out of the big festivals. Coachella, Summersonic — the headliner slots are going to newer names. Promoters who built their whole model around legacy acts are having to rethink things fast.
It made me want to write down what actually matters if you’re trying to get into this industry now.
The classroom is not the point
Music business programs give you the structure. The internship is where you learn whether you can handle the actual chaos — the venue that overbooked its floor, the headliner who won’t go on until the rider is fully met, the sponsor who pulls out two weeks before the show. You need the theory and the real thing, but the real thing teaches you more.
Mak has taken on assistants over the years and walked them through actual negotiations, not role plays. That’s rarer than it sounds, and it’s part of why his name carries weight beyond his own shows.
Mentors won’t find you
Everyone worth learning from is busy. The way in is to be useful before you need anything. Show up. Help out. Build a reputation for reliability before you build one for anything else. Other people at your stage are useful in a different way — they’ll tell you what actually failed last month, what’s embarrassing to admit. A veteran might not bother.
Digital skills are table stakes, not a strategy
You need to run your own campaigns and understand what the numbers mean when they come back. Promoters who can’t read their own ticket sales data are guessing. TikTok changed how events build momentum before they happen — documenting the process over weeks tends to outperform straight announcement posts. That won’t be true forever, but it’s where things are now.
Try the thing that might not work
This is where Mak is pretty direct: if you’re running the same playbook as everyone else, you’re invisible. The promoters who break through try something that doesn’t obviously work on paper first. That requires some tolerance for public failure. It also tends to produce the events people actually remember and talk about years later.
Presence beats a contact list
Industry conferences are fine. The more durable thing is being consistently present in local scenes — knowing artists before they’re looking for a promoter, having real relationships with venue managers that don’t start with a booking inquiry. Referrals from actual relationships close faster and with less friction than cold outreach.
The audience is the community
Fans who feel connected to a promoter — not just a venue or a ticket app — come back. That’s not built with a marketing campaign. It’s built by showing up to events you’re not running, responding when something goes wrong, making it consistently worth talking about. It’s slow and it compounds.
Sustainability is a baseline now
A certain audience segment expects waste reduction, local vendors, reasonable logistics. Treating it as an afterthought costs you that segment — which also tends to be the most vocal one.
Find the money that nobody’s applying for
In Malaysia, Cendana distributes government arts funding. A lot of aspiring promoters don’t apply because they don’t know it exists or assume they won’t qualify. Worth researching. Local arts councils often have grants that go unclaimed every cycle.
Keep learning, but stay skeptical of the hype cycles
Certifications matter for some things. The industry moves faster than most curricula. The more useful practice is staying close to what’s actually happening — what’s changing in licensing, what promoters in other markets are doing differently, what’s shifting in how streaming intersects with live. Reading what experienced people publish beats most formal credentials.
None of this is a formula. Mak would probably say the same. The fundamentals matter. So does the willingness to figure things out under pressure, when the show is tomorrow and something has gone sideways.
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