The DJ plays: No Dark Dates and Advance the Rider

What a play is

In the DJ and AV edition, a play is a one-tap job. You pick it, set a couple of plain controls, and the system does one defined piece of booking work for you. Every play runs under a guardrail. The two DJ plays below are draft-only: they never send anything, and they never put a price in anything. Money, dates, and commitments stay yours.

No Dark Dates

What it does: matches your open prime dates with the past buyers and venues most likely to fill them.

Your prime dates are your inventory. An unsold Friday or Saturday inside the window it protects (90 days ahead by default) is a dark date. The play reads your calendar, your past gigs, and your leads, then hunts fills from what already exists, in this order:

1. Rebook clocks. Annual events rebook on the client's planning window, not the gig anniversary. A December corporate party is decided August to October. A school dance is planned when staff return in early fall. The play finds past events whose planning window is open right now.
2. Inbox archaeology. Threads that died warm, meaning a real inquiry that went quiet before a no, are dormant money. It matches them to the open dates they asked about or could take.
3. Venue partners. Venues whose preferred list you sit on, or rooms you have played clean, can take a priority hold on a dark date.

What it produces: a dated shortlist. Each open date gets its two or three likeliest fills, a one-line reason for each, and where each candidate came from. For the strongest few, it drafts an opener in your voice that names the date and why this buyer fits it. No prices, no availability promises, drafts only. If your window is genuinely healthy, it says so plainly and stops. It never invents a candidate to fill the sheet.

When to run it: whenever the next stretch of prime dates looks soft. It looks 90 days ahead by default, so a regular run protects the calendar before a slow season becomes a slow month.

Advance the Rider

What it does: answers an incoming rider line by line, so the tour manager knows you actually read it.

When a booked act or client sends a rider or tech pack, this play turns it into an advance reply that proves the whole document was read. Every line item is answered by name with one of exactly three words of intent: supplied (you bring it), sourced (a rental house covers it, and the house is named), or excluded (said plainly). Nothing gets silence, because silence on a line item becomes a missing bass amp on show day.

Power gets a real answer, not just "power confirmed": which panel, which circuits, and what shares them. It keeps AV on one phase where possible, never lets lighting dimmers share circuits with audio, and plans for sixteen amps on a twenty-amp breaker. For video and playback, it asks the laptop-and-adapter question now, not at the podium. If any signal path touches a stream, it says in writing that venue WiFi is not a show-critical path and names the hardline or dedicated circuit instead.

Riders also bury little canary clauses to reveal whether anyone read the document: the odd small ask, the specific gaff-tape brand, the ribbon mic on channel 17. Each one is answered by name. Where your judgment is genuinely better, the play pushes back exactly once, with the reason, and ends it "your call". The advance closes with exactly one question, the one that most advances the show.

What it produces: an unsent draft advance in your voice, saved on the lead, plus a one-line note of what the rider revealed about the gig's real scale. No new numbers, no prices, and nothing goes out until you send it.

When to run it: the day a rider or tech pack lands. Advancing early flags conflicts two weeks out, not at load-in.

The guardrails, in one breath

• Both plays are draft-only. Nothing is sent until you read it and send it yourself.
• Neither play ever quotes a price or promises availability.
• Everything they surface cites where it came from. No invented candidates, no guessed answers.