Special Formats

What you'll be able to do

• Adapt the tour machinery to festivals, support runs, one-offs, internationals, and residencies
• Know which rules bend per format and which never do
• Close the loop: every format feeds the same machine

The short version: Five formats, one machine, different settings. Festival slots: routing anchors with offset economics and shared-audience plays. Support runs: marketing inside someone else's tour, where your rights are defined by the deal and your job is harvesting the exposure. One-off destination shows: DAS 201's compressed clock with travel-radius geo. International firsts: the full stack meeting new platforms, currencies, and consent regimes - humility settings on. Residencies: the weekly machine (DAS 201 M6) meets the touring artist. The closing doctrine: formats change the settings, never the machine - and every format's harvest feeds the same pools, the same list, the same map.

The five formats

Festival slots as routing anchors. The slot is a market visit without a hard ticket: the offset economics (festival fee vs the routed-show revenue it displaces or enables) sit with booking, while marketing's job is the capture - the festival audience is the market's warmest future pool, harvested via the set's content (M7 spec), the drop-page play ("we're at [fest] - next headline show first access"), and geo-tagged capture in the festival window. The festival-adjacent sideshow (the late-night club show in festival week) runs DAS 201's compressed one-off clock with the festival's own gravity as the announce. Rule that never bends: the festival's marketing rights and asset rules live in the offer - read them before running anything with the fest's name on it.

Support runs. You're inside someone else's organism: marketing rights (what you can announce, when, with whose assets) come from the tour's terms, and the job inverts - not selling the room (the headliner's problem) but HARVESTING the exposure: your set's nightly content, the drop-page keyword from the stage, the per-market pool growth in rooms you couldn't headline yet. A support run harvested properly is the growth-market evidence (M6) that books the headline routing after it. The partnership-ad play runs in reverse where the headliner's team allows: their handle amplifying the package in your strong markets is the ask worth making once.

One-off destination shows. DAS 201 M7's compressed clock plus the travel dimension: the geo isn't a metro, it's a decision-radius (who actually travels for this), the announce runway lengthens (travel plans need lead time), and payment-plan mechanics matter at destination price points. The alert stack's city segments invert - you're messaging MANY cities about one room.

International firsts. The full stack with humility settings: the local platform reality re-verified per market (the Matrix's five questions, asked fresh - ticketing norms differ by country), consent regimes for the alert layer checked per jurisdiction (M5's counsel flag, doubly), currency/timezone ops (M3's checklist), and the local-promoter layer weighted heavier in the split - their market knowledge is worth more than your imported instincts. First internationals are experiment markets by definition; grade them like it.

Residencies. The weekly machine (DAS 201 M6) meets the touring artist: the evergreen build with the artist's network layered on, the destination-audience dimension (residency cities import their crowds), and the residency's real product - the compounding local-plus-visitor pool that makes month three cheaper than month one. The touring artist's residency is the one format where the tour machine and the venue machine are the same machine, run by the same doctrine, which is a fitting place for the school's last module to land.

From the field

An artist's eighteen months ran every format in this module: a festival slot (harvested into a market pool that headlined eight months later), a support run (drop-page keyword from the stage nightly - the list grew more in six weeks of support than in the prior year), two one-offs (compressed clocks, one clean win, one clean lesson), a first European leg (experiment-graded, local promoters weighted, consent done right), and a hometown residency that the whole machine now feeds. None of it required new doctrine - every format ran the same machine with different settings, and every format's harvest landed in the same pools and the same map. The routing that came out the far side didn't resemble the one instinct would have drawn. It was better. The map was real.

Common mistakes

• Festival/support marketing run without reading the rights (the terms define the job)
• Support exposure spent instead of harvested (the run IS the growth-market evidence)
• One-off destination shows on metro-geo settings (the radius is a decision, not a distance)
• International firsts graded like anchors (they're experiments; grade them clean)
• Any format's harvest skipped - the one rule that never, ever bends

Take-home

The Special Formats Settings Card - one card per format: the settings that change, the rules that don't, the rights checklist, and the harvest spec. Plus the track's closing one-liner, suitable for framing.

Sources & dates

DAS 201 M6/M7 + DAS 203 M8 cross-references as cited · format settings are Darkroom practice, presented as such

Learn more

Optional extra credit. Nothing below is required for the quiz, the certificate, or the job - the full lesson is above. This is for the sickos who want more.

• The DAS 301 final awaits. The machine is yours. Take it on the road.